The Maine Track Club has its chickadee symbol and the Aroostook County Musterds have their, well, you know (that "mus" there rhymes with "goose.")

Now a new animal has descended upon the Maine road racing/running club scene. Ladies and gentlemen, please cover your ears and welcome the raucous Crows.

This proudly ragtag, semi-organized flock of about 35 is based on Mount Desert Island and sprang up shortly after the MDI Marathon was created last October.

As Crows co-founder and MDI Marathon director Gary Allen explained, the usual pattern is for a club to form and then some time later create a marathon. But here, with typical Crow perversity, the marathon came first.

"We're not a big or traditional club - we're more independent souls," said Allen, a landscape designer who lives on Great Cranberry (a 10-minute hop across the water from Northeast Harbor).

"We have the unity of a club, but with independent spirits. I tend to do a lot of training alone, because I tend to think that way, and so do a lot of these guys. A lot of them are serious trail runners, like Peter Keeney and Peter Palmer, who just never came out of the woods. The club tends to fit what we are instead of us fitting into a club mold."

While not formed for competitive purposes, the Crows include runners with what Allen calls "pretty severe credentials." Among the founding members are club president Keeney, a formidable trail runner; Tom St. Germain, second at Bay State last year in 2:41:27 and owner of Jack Russell's brew pub, aka Crows HQ; masters marathoners David Painter and Kevin Johnson; and the aforementioned Palmer, a 50-plus guy.

"He is the current record-holder for the Appalachian Trail run from Stone Mountain, Ga., to Mount Katahdin, 49 days and 9 hours," Allen noted of Palmer in a follow-up e-mail.

"I run with him a couple of times a week and all I can say is I pity anyone who tries to beat him in the last 5K of a marathon." Allen, 45, has run a pair of 2:39s among his 47 marathons.

Top female Crows include Robin Emery-Rappa, who lives in Lamoine and is in the Maine Running Hall of Fame, and Bar Harbor Half-Marathon race director Sharyn Kingma. And among younger Crows, look out for Evan Graves and Judson Cake. At last week's track workout at MDI High School, Allen said, the two did a 3-mile tempo run in 14:50 while the other Crows, doing 200s and 400s, failed to gain an inch on them.

UMaine-Presque Isle student Graves, 22, was second in last month's Bar Harbor Spring 5K in 15:14 and first in the Aroostook Mile, in 4:15. And Cake, 24, ran 48:32 to finish second in May's Sugarloaf 15K and 15:10 to win the above-mentioned 5K. He's also the club's webmaster (www.crowathletics.com).

But not all Crows are hotshots.

"We'll gladly race anyone who wants to race, and we train hard, but we don't need to spend a lot of time talking about it," Allen said. "We're happy to exist in a very crow-like manner. We're just . . . here. Year-round, and in all kinds of weather. Everywhere. You know, just like crows."

And not quite all Crows are from the MDI area as the birds have picked up a few shiny objects from as far away as Hungary (new member Borbali "Bori" Kiss joined the club at last week's Beech Mountain Trail 5K/15K), and Miami (15-year-old Bryan Starkey, off a seventh-place in the South regional Footlocker freshman race, and a recent track workout guest.) Plus there's me, the token effete southern Mainer.

The Crows have their own eight-race series, which began at the Beech Mountain events (Cake won the longer in 1:02:41; St. Germain, 35, the 5K in 29:34, with Starkey second in 31:25). The series includes the Oct. 20 MDI Marathon and ends, appropriately, with a Halloween 5K and kids' mile. And the Crows have their own singlet, handsome but stark. "A Wyethesque rendering of a raven, from an antique woodblock," Allen called it, and no one will ever confuse its forbidding mien with that of the chirpy MTC chickadee-dee-dee.

The Crows even have some sense of a higher purpose as Allen said they would like to help Down East races become more efficient by bringing in services such as online registration and chip timing and helping certify courses.

And as the club has its origins in a group of longtime friends, this weekend they are putting on a 24-hour relay on the MDI High track to benefit Cranberry Islander and marathoner Jeff Weisbruch.

Weisbruch, an accomplished chef and artist just starting a career as a physician's assistant at Eastern Maine Med, was recently diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and had surgery in Boston on June 21. The all-comers benefit run began at noon Saturday and ends at noon today. Weisbruch plans to do a ceremonial first lap and final lap.

To the best of Allen's recollection, the original Crow idea goes back some 15 years, to a trip he and brother Larry Allen and O.J. Logue took to the Boston Primer in Readfield, Mass. They somewhat jokingly entered the race as a team of Road Crows. While the name has lain dormant down the years, the feisty Crow, er, philosophy (to lend it a sort of spurious dignity) has persisted.

"Crows are as plentiful as runners along roads and highways. Motorists pass them with the same indifferent, never-saw-them stare," Allen cackled. "Crows, like runners, get no respect, are out in all weather and are always in the road."

And the world is rich in crow legend. For example, crows have been symbols of virility in medieval times, are revered as tricksters in Native American lore and were messengers to Odin. How exactly the MDI Crows will enrich Western civilization remains to be seen, but personally I am looking forward to the rhinoceros I have been assured will appear somewhere after mile 18 of the MDI Marathon.

John Rolfe of Portland is a staff writer and a member of Crow Athletics. He can be reached at 791-6429 or at: jrolfe@pressherald.com