A Flock Without a Murder is an outdoor birdhouse that resembles an abstract human body at The Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It is also a scarecrow: a safehouse for flock of birds, without a murder of crows.

The scarecrow is a creature-like decoy humans construct as a means to communicate with crows. Crows, intelligent enough to recognize the shape of anthropomorphic silhouettes, are often deterred from the fly-zones of agrarian lands because of the 1:1 sculptural replicas with human characteristics. The scarecrow expands the conventional semiotic function of architectural elements beyond the intraspecies linguistics between humans, into one that is from humans to non-humans.

Crows are a common predator to smaller birds. A Flock Without a Murder is a 12-foot-tall gentle monster that functions as a visual impediment to their predation. As a motherly hen-like figure, this structure is a multi-compartment townhouse for smaller avian species, containing 27 interior nooks and crannies to shelter nests of eggs and broods. Whereas crows possess the ability to receive the message of deterrence transmitted by humans via this oversized scarecrow, smaller birds that cannot distinguish this signal can reside within this colossus as a safe haven. This is a project where no murders of crows may commit murders of smaller flocks of birds.

This project was a part of the For the Birds exhibition at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.