rendezvous with the black birds

Head to the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, to get to know its crows and those who appreciate their company.

The great corvid restaurant

For those who live in the countryside, frequenting crows is probably commonplace. In the cities, it is much less so. In the capital, there is a place, not far from the Gare d’Austerlitz, where humans and corvids are asked to share the same playground. This is the Jardin des Plantes.

There are about a hundred crows there. They settled there en masse when the Vigipirate plan was introduced in 1997. We had then replaced all the closed trash cans with transparent plastic ones. In other words, an abundance of food for these specialists in culinary breakage, who have made it their great restaurant…

Twenty years later, by chance meeting a professor from the Natural History Museum, which is located in the Jardin des Plantes, a young woman, Marie-Lan Taÿ-Pamart, fell in love with this community. of crows. Today, she knows how to recognize them, calls them by their names and their ring numbers, and gladly tells you their stories of the heart.

“Crows express affection by preening each other’s feathers. They do this with their mates – most crows are monogamous – and with their young.”

Corneillist Marie-Lan Taÿ-Pamart

on franceinfo

The story of Marie-Lan and the corneillists of the Jardin des Plantes today gives rise to a beautiful comic strip, The Crow Woman, for which Geoffroy Le Guilcher signs the screenplay, very gentle and particularly informed, and Camille Royer the drawing, very colorful. In this comic, in addition to a wealth of fascinating information on this 50 million year old bird – which we are told could be the smartest animal on Earth after man -, we really enjoy follow the wanderings of our guide.

The Crow Woman, an investigation into the hidden world of black birdspublished by Futuropolis