One thing that you can't help but notice if you're biking or driving around the outskirts of the small east coast town of Sackville, New Brunswick, are the crows.
They're everywhere.
You can see them perched up in ones or twos along the rickety fence posts and traffic signs that run all along the dirt roads, or meeting together in great big groups in the farmers' fields, or shuffling slowly along the roadside, throwing sidelong glances at the cars passing by with a look that makes you feel like they know something you don't.
When I came back to Sackville after having lived in Toronto for many years, my partner Monica and I bought a big blue house right in the centre of town. In the lovely back yard was a large tree that branched out over the fence and across almost the entire back garden. It was also the playground for about 30 crows.
Almost every day, the murder of crows flew into that tree to sing songs, have fights, buzz around, and do whatever mysterious things crows do together. Then all of a sudden they'd disband, flying back out from the branches in a flurry of fluttering black wings, heading back to the nearby farmers fields to do things like pose as fun little subjects for my photographs.
In the summer, our kids used to pick the berries from the shrubs around our house as offerings for the crows. I'm not sure what it was about them doing that, but it reminded me of a series of kids' drawings I once did of animal groups that have interesting collective names. So I picked up my pen and started to draw some crows.
When we released our "Murder of Crows" tee, it starting flying off the shelves immediately (cheesy pun intended). Since we released it almost a year ago, it's still our number one best selling design. There's clearly something about crows that people love.
You may notice we have two variants of this design. Upon customer request, we added a second option, "Three Crows", that includes the image of the grows, but no text. Given everything that is going on in today's world, we agreed that an option that was gentler in tone was a good idea.
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Our crows come in olive green for unisex tees, slate blue for women's style tees, and on a tea towel if you want to add a little gothy vibe to your kitchen ;)