Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was getting irritated, tapping his fingers on his lawn chair. As a reporter and photographer crouched hopefully in the bushes behind his Los Angeles home, his two wild crows refused to cooperate with a photo shoot.
“I’m not going to reward their bad behavior,” he said finally, closing the greasy bag of meat scraps he’d brought for the birds. He entered the house, followed by a dog.
As an independent presidential candidate, Kennedy, 70, has drawn on his storied political lineage, his career in environmental law and his caustic anti-establishment beliefs that sometimes veer into conspiracy theories. But an often overlooked part of his pitch to voters is his long-cultivated and not-too-worn image of a rugged outdoorsman with a peculiar enthusiasm for wildlife and nature.
And yet, I was surprised recently when a routine phone call to ask Mr. Kennedy for comments on another article was interrupted by a loud “grace” on the other end of the line.
Asked what the sound was, Kennedy paused and said, “I have some pet crows.”
I had many questions, the most pressing of which was: “Can I meet the crows?” (Another one, which wasn’t said, was: are they after the brain worm?) I would be in Los Angeles next weekend anyway.
“Of course,” he said.
Birds have always been a particular fascination of Kennedy’s. From his youth, he says, he kept crows, peacocks, ravens, owls, homing pigeons and guinea fowl as pets. He trains falcons and hunts with them; in New York, he says he was a licensed bird rehabilitator, caring for injured or orphaned birds. In 2005 he published a children’s book about Saint Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals, birds and the environment. His campaign donors were invited to go hawking with him.
Crows are beautiful, intelligent, cooperative and adaptable, fiercely protective and omnipresent. But they are not the stuff of polite society. Their black plumage, round eyes, haunting scream, and eager search for trash have earned them a prominent and frightening place in myth and folklore. They are opportunistic eaters of almost everything, but their consumption of carrion – their comfort with the dead – made them a bad omen long before Edgar Allan Poe turned them into a cliché.
Its collective noun is a “wickedness” or – wait for it – a “conspiracy” of crows.
Kennedy, and the personal and political curiosities surrounding him, have emerged as an unpredictable fixture in this presidential election, with some polls showing him in the double digits, drawing votes from both President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump. Even if he can’t vote in enough states to win, he could still overturn the election: He’s already on the ballot in the swing state of Michigan, along with five other states.
His campaign filed ballot requests in more than a dozen other states, but he is unlikely to be officially approved for those votes in time to qualify for next week’s CNN presidential debate.
Still, he had time to introduce the crows last week, so I headed to the mountainous regions northwest of Los Angeles to meet them, accompanied by Ruth Fremson, a veteran New York Times photographer.
On a walk with his three dogs, Mr. Kennedy told us about his “first crow,” which appeared in his life when he was about 10 years old. Crows are bigger and smarter and are “sociable,” he said.
When he and his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, moved into their current home about four years ago, he noticed a pair of crows nesting in a large palm tree. A few months ago, he said, he decided to try to domesticate them. The main strategy is nutrition.
“They are getting closer and closer,” he said. “By the end of summer, they’ll be eating out of my hands.”
I asked him how Mrs. Hines felt about this. “She’s good with crows,” he said. But he added: “She had a big fight with my emu.”
Back at the house, Mrs. Hines confirmed: “That emu was so aggressive.”
The emu, Toby, moved to Malibu with Kennedy in 2014 and took up residence in the backyard. But Toby was jealous of Mrs. Hines and began to attack her violently. She began carrying a shovel in self-defense whenever she left the house. Every morning she asked herself, “Will today be the day I wake up and kill an emu in my backyard?”
One day, alone at home, she answered a producer’s call and left for better reception. “I started telling him about this script, and the emu started chasing me as fast as he could,” she recalled.
Here, Ms. Hines — dressed for a pickleball game — gave the impression of pitching a producer while batting a large, flightless bird.
Years later, Toby was killed by a mountain lion.
Crows are comparatively unobjectionable, Hines said, even “cute.” But when Kennedy is on the campaign trail, they can get a little needy. Recently, Mrs. Hines looked up and saw them staring at her impatiently from the bathroom skylight. “Like, ‘When is he coming back?’”
Even as the crows knocked softly on her bedroom door, Hines said, she did not respond, “Never again.”
Instead, she told them, “Guys, I’m not interested.”
As she said this, Kennedy took the bag of leftover meat — “cheap steak,” he said — from the refrigerator and went out into the backyard. Raising his head, he shouted, “Caw! Wow!
A few moments later, two black arrows appeared against the sky, circling and floating, their spade-shaped tails and feathers glowing as they approached. They called back.
Kennedy threw some meat onto the deck and then sat down in a lawn chair, while Ruth, about 20 feet away, pointed her large lens at the scene.
The crows made several close sweeps, one at a time. Finally, one perched in a nearby tree while the other landed on the deck. He grabbed the meat and the pair flew away.
“This is unusual,” Kennedy said. The birds were being particularly cautious, with one acting as lookout while the other took the food. “Normally, they would both land at the same time and come towards me.”
This went on for over an hour and they seemed increasingly cautious.
“I don’t think they like the camera,” Kennedy said.
We agreed to meet again later in the afternoon, when the crows might be less nervous. Meanwhile, we paid a visit to his office, where we saw a large stuffed turtle – his former pet, Carruthers – and a taxidermied Sumatran tiger, a gift from President Sukarno of Indonesia. to Mr. Kennedy’s father, Robert F. Kennedy.
When we returned hours later, the crows still seemed deeply suspicious. Ruth and I went on and off deck, hoping that acting calmly might attract them. I learned that one of Mr. Kennedy’s dogs, Ronan, who is now 13 years old and deeply arthritic, had killed several domestic animals in his prime, including an emu and a turtle (not Carruthers).
Soon, the crows were no longer in sight. Kennedy apologized but was late for a television commercial.
Hours later, at the airport, he sent a series of photographs and videos. Apparently, as soon as we left, the crows landed together.
“Now they are cooperating,” Kennedy said. By the end of the week, they were within reach.
This week, he introduced his followers to the birds with a video on social media. “I got them to come and join me for meditations every morning on my porch,” he said.
“Edgar Allen Potus,” wrote one commenter on Instagram.
