It is built like any scarecrow, which is what it begins as: a cross of poles, an old shirt or sack stuffed with straw, a turnip or bundle of rags for a head, hung with strips of cloth, rattling pot-lids, and twists of hedge-bramble. Conjured, it stands up off its pole and walks, stiff and loose-jointed, with a long, swinging, unsteady stride, its arms lifting and falling. Its edges waver a little, as all held constructs' do. It rustles and creaks as it goes, the lids clatter, and it smells of damp straw and the field.

They work the open sown fields of the cradle-web’s farming country, mostly at spring sowing and in the weeks before harvest, and now and then in orchards. They are a village matter, not a lord’s, and the hedge-conjurers who make them go from village to village with the seasons.

A Crow-Scarer does one thing: it walks its field’s furrows from dawn to dusk and lifts its arms at anything with wings that lands, and at anything else that runs across the sown ground. It has no judgement. It will chase a farm child as readily as a crow, and it turns at the field’s edge whether or not the job is done.

It moves without tiring for as long as the conjurer keeps it, and birds learn quickly to stay clear of a field where the scarecrow walks. Its strength is a scarecrow’s: it can knock a child over and frighten a thief, and little more.

It is made in a chant at the field’s edge and lasts some weeks, with the conjurer coming back every few days to renew it. When the work ends, or the conjurer moves on, it falls back into a heap of poles, sacking, and straw, which the village props up again as an ordinary scarecrow.

It saves the seed. Its dangers are small and real: it frightens livestock and children, it walks into a ditch and has to be fetched, and a careless conjurer’s scarecrow has been known to chase a ploughman off his own field. Thieves who come for the seed at dusk find it coming at them.

Village children dare each other to touch one, and the older folk say a crow-scarer that walks after dark has someone else’s wishes in it, which is not so; a construct does only what it is told. A hedge-conjurer’s crow-scarer is part of the spring in many valleys, and some villages dress theirs in an old coat of the last farmer to die, which they say keeps the crows honest.

Thieves who raid an orchard by night tell of being chased over the wall by a straw figure with a farmer’s coat flapping, and some never steal fruit again.