This is totally unrelated to anything at all. It's just a neat little story that deserves to be somewhere.

My great-grandmother had a reputation as a witch. People didn't fuck with her as a result. Some people would go to church on Sundays; my great-grandmother and great-grandfather went fishing instead. It was easier to catch fish on Sundays she said, because the fish thought people would be in church. People (usually the priest) would warn us that we'd face punishment for this sin (and practicing “witchcraft”, allowing women to fish, and various other ungodly acts to follow), but the only punishment seemed to be fish for lunch on Sundays…

She helped people out with what amounted to birth control at the time, which was a taboo subject for respectable non-witchy people. To prove a point, or maybe to advertise her services, she had only one child (well, she adopted one of her sister's kids after she died in childbirth; further proof that contraception has and always will be important). A small family was a novelty at the time and as a result of their “witchcraft” (which in this case was probably a few simple observations), they could save money, buy land, and were prosperous. Everyone else scraped by because they were feeding six or more kids. While they scraped, my family wasted food in a weird way: they fed crows.

In the grand scheme of things, feeding crows is probably anti-social. Despite that, it continues even now. My parents feed their own little flock every day. The crows have a dish to themselves and they get scraps from every meal. There may be some logic to this, which makes the tradition all that much spookier. You'd think deliberately feeding crows would be like deliberately feeding rats: you'd just get more of them. This doesn't seem to be the case at all. My parents' crows consist of a group of three. My great-grandparents and grandparents had more, but they had more land (though still, only about six). It takes a particularly brazen crow to accept a handout from humans. After all, the rest of humanity seems bent on killing them…

Basically what is happening here is that a well-fed crow runs off other crows to protect its meal ticket. Crows don't actually eat all that much, however left to themselves they will destroy crops. This isn't entirely their fault and more a limitation of their species. A crow can only peck at things and get a few bites to eat before it has ruined whatever it is eating. A human can delicately peel and carve every edible bite out of anything and we make the inedible edible by cooking it. Our scraps, finely chopped for their convenience, feed them well and when fed, they don't need to bother with your garden. In fact, this frees up the well-fed crows to terrorize any interloper.

I'm sure the story was originally feeding the spirits of ancestors or something, but it the end it seems to have a purpose and it works.