I’ve been noticing scarecrows adorning people’s houses as they get their harvest groove on. It occurred to me this morning that this doesn’t make sense – scarecrows would be used in summer, while the corn crop is actually growing, not in the fall when the plants are dying.
This concludes today’s M&P thing I Must Share.
In the fall is harvest season…so conceivably, you could use scarecrows in the fall, too. I mean, in warmer climes harvest season is only just beginning.
But scarecrows seem to go with the whole fall thing anyway. Hay rides, scarecrows, and haunted houses. Besides animated scarecrows can be, well, scary, which goes with Halloween.
Well, yeah, that’s kind of my question – how did scarecrows come to be fall symbols? Is it that they come out of the cornfields when the harvest is done, or what?
WAGs -
During the summer, the scarecrow wouldn’t be visible - it would be revealed during harvest as the plants either withered or were cut down.
The scarecrows were primarily to discourage crows from eating the ripened grain, thus needed more in the fall when the grain had ripened.
Stuffed with straw? Creepy looking? I don’t really remember scarecrows being that big a halloween thing in my childhood.
I think I can discount #2. From what I gather, a scarecrow (or its modern versions) are used to deter crows (and other birds) from eating the freshly planted seeds, not the ripened grain…
But then again, I am known to be wrong…
This is a WAG, not supported by any research ('cause I didn’t do any), but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the scarecrow at Halloween is the decendant of the Wicker Man sacrificed in Ye Olden Days.
While it’s possible that humans were stuffed into structures made of straw, it’s more likely that a man-shape was made out of straw and then burned in thanksgiving, or as a sacrifice of the first grains harvested to the gods to ensure plenty.
This may be why it’s the Wizard of Oz straw scarecrow that’s the fall harvest/Halloween image, rather than the ribbony or bird-of-prey shaped ones that are more often used to scare birds in reality.
A farmer down the road from me hangs dead crows around his corn crop. They are upside down, tied at the feet, and hanging off nails at the top of 4x4’s.
I have never seen a live crow in this area.
A suggestion: Stay out of his cornfield, ltfire.
Point taken. It’s my jogging route, and I stay on the other side of the road. 
I would guess that farmers would be more worried about freshly-planted seed corn than ripened grain – but I’m no farmer. (Spent one weekend working on a friend’s farm when I was ten; found out that for farm kids, the weekend doesn’t mean cartoons and daydreaming. Plenty of exercise, though.)
Do scarecrows work? I mean, do they keep crows away? I’d think that after awhile, with the straw figure not showing movement, the crows would just ignore it.
Nice to see a thread about literal strawmen, instead of fallacious arguments.