Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Raawwwk On!

Every day, as evening approaches, dozens of small airplanes fly over the house, headed northeast for the airport--package planes, Dave says. And at the same time, crows in huge numbers fly in the opposite direction. For several hours, they can be spotted winging their way southwest over our yard. Clearly, they have declined the lucrative small-parcel routes that FedEx and the like specialize in, but for a long time we didn't know what they were up to, or where they were going.

Our crows--the family we like to call the Walnut Boys, who live in the big Douglas fir across the alley--head out too. But their friends are also streaming in from much farther afield. It's a daily mini-migration. As far as we can tell, every dang crow in the metropolitan area goes flapping in the same direction at dusk.  Come morning they're all back again and ready to join the dawn raucous. I mean chorus.

We've learned that some of them convene for the evening in the larger neighborhood trees, but those are just minor cliques and outliers. Most of them are bound for downtown. Hundreds. Thousands. We happened upon them during a walk. They had settled in a large construction site. The tarmac was lined with them. It was the softest parking lot in town. Some of them spruced up in puddles and the rest hung out behind the velvet rope until it was time to hit the club. Currently they're favoring a stand of trees near Portland State University.

That's what it's all about. They're going to a roost where they can let it all hang out. It might seem like having a slumber party every single night makes it less special, but they're fine with it. Maybe there are a few introverted crows out there but you don't see those. They're nestled into their favorite conifer boughs with Jane Austen and a scavenged bag of chips.

The experts have theories about why they gang up. Perhaps they're warmer, particularly if they're downtown. Perhaps they feel more secure against the rare marauding urban owl. Perhaps they exchange information about which humans need pooping on, or about good food sources they found that day.

As if! Please. They might talk up a good dumpster find, but nobody's giving away any coordinates. They're just social. They're all about family and friends. It's hard to tell the age of a crow. The very youngest have bluish eyes, but other than that it's a sea of conformity. Everyone gets a uniform. And the kids don't leave. They'll be kickin' it with the adults for at least a year and sometimes two. But you can get clues to their maturity by their behavior, and there's no better place to observe that than at one of their sleepovers.

For a while it's all yap yap yap and nobody is really listening to anyone else. Then the old ones nod off. The teenagers stay up and flirt. Midway down on the broader branches is where they have the Twister game set up. The adolescents are playing Truth or Dare for a while until they split off into smaller groups and swap implausible rumors about where eggs come from. The second-year juveniles sneak off as soon as the adults are asleep and head over to Ross Island to toilet-paper the heron rookery.

That leaves the youngsters, egg-fresh and blue eyes fading, to hold up the banner of innocence. As if! Please. They're the ones making all those crank caws.

38 comments:

  1. Very interesting. I love watching all corvids and observing their intelligence. They can learn new things and then teach their children. I've had several wonderful interactions with ravens and magpies too.

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    1. Don't forget the jays. I loves 'em too. Ain't a one of them couldn't kick my ass, either.

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    2. I call them birdie conventions.

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  2. I consider crows my "totem animal"; I love them dearly for their intelligence, creativity, and for their familial bonds. Every once in a while, seemingly at random, we will see large flocks of crows gathering from all different directions in some seemingly random field. We speculate that they are having a "potlatch" -- various tribes of crows are gathering so that their young may meet a mate, and so that other family members can catch up on what's been happening with each other. How do they know when to meet? Perhaps they set the time by the stars. But how do they know where to meet, as it seems to be a different place all the time? That I cannot figure out. Maybe they have a telepathic system of communication, much like a "crow internet". Maybe they convey information in their "cawing system" that is more intricate than we can discern. I know that I tend to anthropomorphize these birds, but that is so easy to do as they are so like us in many ways.

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    1. Oh I have little doubt they can communicate all of that. They have quite a range of vocalizations. I wonder if some of the old ones say things like "no, let's meet down at the, you know, near the brown thingy, just past the, the, you know..."

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  3. When we first moved here there were small bands of crows hopping down the incline from our neighbor's yard to ours. They're such large birds that it was disconcerting at first. They disappeared then for years and then reappeared this fall, who knows why?

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    1. Please find out and get back to us. Perhaps conduct an interview. We've got inquiring minds.

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    2. Crows and their birdy relatives are very susceptible to the West Nile virus. If you have West Nile in your area, you local population may have died off, and other crows are just now reoccupying the territory.

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    3. Here, we don't have MUCH West Nile, and we certainly do not have a crow shortage. But that makes sense for Marty.

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  4. If they had opposable thumbs they would rule the world.

    I love how they gang up on the occasional hawk that threatens their territory.

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    1. I have parrots, and they really hate it when I bring up the dreaded opposable thumb subject. But I only do it because they start with the whole "my ancestors were dinosaurs and yours were merely monkeys" trash talk. What else can I do? They can fly. All we got going is the thumbs....

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    2. Joeh, I once saw a group of crows mobbing a hawk, and some much smaller birds mobbing the slowest of the crows, all at once.

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  5. If I am not mistaken, parrots have zygodactyl feet, which means that two toes point forward, and two point backwards, so isn't having TWO opposable digits on each "hand" even superior to ours?

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    1. Oh, great... give them even more ammunition to use against me! ;-)

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    2. Face it, you're not going to win with your parrots. Plus, they'll probably outlive you.

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  6. Splendid take on one of my favorite birds, bless their raucous hearts.

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    1. Yeah, I'm a big fan. And I get a huge kick out of late August when they're all scruffly and weird-looking. They actually look embarrassed.

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  7. There's a rural area outside of our town where crows gather each evening. They start flying toward it about an hour before dusk - a long, long, LONG stream of them, over the edge of town, heading for their space. It's incredible to watch.

    In another town in our province, though, the crows started roosting downtown. The first year they were a novelty and a bit of a tourist attraction. But as the noise and mess grew, the town resorted to electronic equipment to drive them to a rural area. Sometimes nature can be too overwhelming ...

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    1. There were estimated to be over 40,000 crows a couple of years into the problem. It was a small town, too!

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  8. It's less entertaining than your post, but here's a recent 'article' on KUOW up from you in Seattle:
    http://kuow.org/post/where-do-seattle-area-crows-go-night

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    1. That's really a nice article. With a poop reference! Marzluff is that crow expert who donned a Dick Cheney mask and messed with crow babies and discovered that the crows could recognize him and retaliate, even after having not seen him for a year, and that they taught their kids to hate him, too. Oddly, it even worked without the Dick Cheney mask.

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  9. Smart as a whip, your crow.Or any of its corvid cousins.Right now, over the hammering rain,I can hear one.He could b e a little ticked off at the rain.
    And they most certainly remember people who've been mean.

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    1. We're trying to get them to like us with walnut bribes, but they're all a little standoffish. Maybe they can sense something about us we don't want them to know. Maybe they're going for Trump!

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  10. Oh, Murr, They all get together because the Godfeather has summoned a meeting of the Crowsanostra.

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  11. I wish they had a much more musical voice. Their cawing is obnoxious.

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    1. At one time I think I thought so too, but I don't anymore. So I think maybe you can learn to adjust your ears!

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  12. I like this, you made me laugh. I love crows and ravens.
    We get similar behaviour from our flocks of Corellas, who squawk and screech overhead in huge numbers as they head into the city parklands for the day's feasting, then squawk and screech their way home again around sunset. Every spring.

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    1. Ooo! You made me look them up. They look like parrots. Don't you have swarms of green parroty things that make a murmuration like starlings?

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    2. Think you're thinking of budgerigars.

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    3. Parrots, budgies, cockatoos, you know--the whole Caged Family. Oh! You mean you have them IN THE WILD??

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    4. Yes, we have them in the wild. Hundreds of them. The Budgerigars, we call them Budgies, are the ones that do the murmurations. We don't see them in the cities much anymore, they stick to the rural areas.

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  13. Most of our crows go south for the winter. There are a few hearty souls, but mostly it is the ravens making noise. Lots of croaky noises and they clean up most of the roadkill for the highway department. Not sure if they are unionized, though.

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    1. We love ravens too. Cool bristles around their beaks, if you'll notice.

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  14. "crank caws"!!!!!!! I love my crows!!!!!

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  15. Well done. Crows are unique and they certainly know more than we think!

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