Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome back California poet Dave Seter with a bemusing and quietly insightful meditation on crows — and on the strange human impulse to seek out particular creatures as if the act of seeing them confers a kind of ownership. In doing so, we often overlook the abundance of other beings that cross our path when we aren’t fixated on a single expectation.
His poem, “On a Corvid Bird Walk No Crows Are Seen,” leads us into the gentle absurdity of a nature walk where birds are plentiful, lively, and varied, yet the narrator longs for one thing only: a crow. The desire becomes almost comic in its intensity, a yearning that grows sharper with every non‑crow that flits by.
“But this cosmopolitan park has yielded—zero—crows. Of course when you don’t want them they dot the sky and mob— a murder of crows.”
Seter’s conversational tone and wry humor make the poem immediately accessible, but beneath the levity lies a subtle unease — a recognition of how human expectations shape our experience of the natural world. We chase what we want to see, and in doing so, we risk missing what is already offering itself to us. The poem nudges us toward humility, reminding us that nature is not obliged to fulfill our desires, and that wonder often arrives from directions we never thought to look.
Read “On a Corvid Bird Walk No Crows Are Seen” in Synkroniciti’s Expectations, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/ .
Dave Seter is a novice birder. The list of birds he hasn’t seen is longer than the list of birds he has seen. He is also an environmental engineer, poet, essayist, and translator. He is the author of the poetry collection Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove, 2021) and the chapbook Somewhere West of the Mississippi(Mammoth Publications, 2025). He is currently serving as Sonoma County Poet Laureate 2024-2026.