Crows

3/12/2015

Crows, just their name immediately bring back Hitchcock's movie "The Birds", which I saw as a teenager and was properly terrified!

I know there must be a reason for crows, but all I ever see them do is break open trash bags and scatter the contents and/or pick at the carcasses of dead animals.  Either way, they are definitely the bird I detest the most.

I would love to put out day old bread for the other birds (robins, etc.), but know that the crows will bully their way in to enjoy the goodies.  

So how many crows are out there?  You'll be surprised by the numbers:  Approximately 2,56,782 in India itself. Throughout the world the number ranges from about 7 to 8.5 million- that's a lot of crows.


On the other hand, every last one of them very likely remembers you as the weird human who kept staring at them. Researchers in Seattle performed an experiment with some crows around their college campus. They captured seven of the birds, tagged them, then let them go. And they did it all while wearing creepy skin masks, because it was funny.  The scientists weren't just playing out horror movie fantasies -- they were testing whether the crows could recognize human faces or not. It turns out they can. Who knew?

One town became a sort of rest stop for crows along their migration route. The end result was hundreds of thousands of birds taking refuge in the city, and because this is a farming community, and crows tend to ruin crops, there were problems. It got so bad that the mayor declared war on them. The townspeople set out, hoping to bag at least 300,000 of the 600k birds currently ruining their livelihood. Unfortunately for the city, word spread fast in the crow communities. The first day after the announcement was made, hunters went out and shot a crow - one out of more than half a million. Now the crows always make sure to fly high enough above settled areas to avoid getting hit with bird shot.

Crows have been known to change their entire migration pattern to avoid farms where even a single crow has been killed in the past. Generations upon generations later, they still remember specific houses where one measly bird has died.

Oh little known fact for me: a poetic term for a large group of crows is called a murder.  Otherwise, they are just in flocks like all other birds.

All that being said, I still don't want these big black birds hanging around in my yard and since I can't figure out an effective way to feed songbirds, I'm unfortunately opting to not feed any birds.

P