
If that didn’t work, the crow became more aggressive, said Bureau, now 80. He had a newspaper route and had to get up at 4:30 a.m., and Smoky would act as his alarm clock - flying into the tent every morning and pecking and pulling at his blanket. Lee Bureau, who was 15 at the time, slept outside in a tent all summer, he said. Smokey then learned other words much to the amazement of everyone, and he recognized faces, particularly those of Bureau family members. She at first kept it in a cage, where she fed it and talked to it every day and taught it to say “Hello,” Bureau said.


I had to know more about Smokey, so I called Lee Bureau and we had a good long chat about the crow, who was a celebrity in Waterville.īureau’s sister, Joy, befriended the crow which had fallen out of a nest. Stores back then didn’t have air conditioning - doors were commonly left open.” “I remember that he would fly into Woolworth’s and pick up a sparkly bracelet and fly away.
Waterville morning sentinel newspaper windows#
“Smokey wreaked havoc with the police as he was always stealing parking tickets off car windows in downtown Waterville,” Foster wrote.

She said that in the early 1950s, her cousins Joy and Lee Bureau had a pet crow named Smokey, and he was smart and mischievous and so well-known about town that when he died, his obituary appeared on the front page of the Morning Sentinel. After I wrote a column last week about a dead crow we found in our backyard, I received lots of interesting comments from people about their own experiences with crows, but none more compelling than the one from Nancy Foster of Waterville. Waterville-CROWS REALLY ARE fascinating creatures. Smokey the Crow was Waterville’s Top Bird
