Members of the crow family have long been a staple of poetic imagery; think Ted Hughes, think Poe’s ‘The Raven’. But my earliest experience of corvids in literature came from Macbeth:
Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.
I say this was my earliest experience, but in fact I’m not sure whether it was reading these lines in the play, or reading a literary critic (I think it was William Empson) talking about them. The critic pointed out, amongst other things, that crows tend to be solitary or travel in pairs, whereas rooks live in great clans. So if you take a look at the footage from Chris Roberts in the nice crows post again, what you’re looking at is a ‘rooky wood’. Or actually some rooks and some Jackdaws, I think, judging from the sound.
The birds gather and chatter and wheel together, in a great sociable to-and-fro. A solitary crow, then, making his way towards this setting, would be something of an outsider, perhaps portending trouble ahead. Like Macbeth making his way to the Royal Court. So I suppose if crows make their appearance in any of these songs, it is with a sense of the thickening of the light, the dusk, and Birnam Wood beginning to stir.