COUNTING CROWS

Reporting back... What I’ve learned about crows, Corvus brachyrhynchos, since a conversation about them with Clyde and Dave over coffee this morning:

Before 1985 crows were rarely seen south of Carlsbad along the coast and in San Diego before 1985.  San Diego Natural History Museum’s curator of ornithology, Philip Unitt, reports that crows, being very smart creatures, have discovered that urban areas are great places to live.  There’s plenty of food, and predators like hawks and owls stay away from city centers.  It’s not a surprise to anybody that the Audubon Society counts birds. Here was a surprise for me.  In 1984 the society counted no crows in a 15-mile-diameter circle near the Chula Vista Nature Center.  In 1985 it found one.  Twenty years later the count was 589 in the same area.  The numbers have jumped almost exponentially in the last five years, not just in Chula Vista area but all over San Diego. Nobody seems to know why crows hadn’t discovered San Diego until the mid-1980s or why they’ve taken a particular liking to the city since then.

Crows are now found everywhere in central San Diego, with great concentrations in the suburbs.  They scavenge in garbage containers, and they eat almost every kind of fruit on trees and peck holes in melons still growing on the ground.  If a kid on a playground drops a piece of candy or any kind of food, it’s likely to be picked up by a crow.  A couple of days ago I watched a crow with a small sealed container of salad dressing in the parking lot of a restaurant strut to within a few feet of where I was standing.  The crow set it down with the top side up and pecked a hold in the peel-back covering.  It tasted to see if it wanted to eat what was inside.  Obviously pleased, it opened the container by holding it with its foot and peeling back the lid. 

I had been puzzled by the late afternoon flight of crows heading east by the hundreds from west to east, so I began researching the phenomenon and learned that they gather in various staging areas around the city then fly in connected convoys along the valley through Mission Gorge and on to the east end of Lake Hodges, the county’s largest roosting site.  I don’t know when or by what route they come back to the areas where they spend the day.  I don’t see them flying in great flocks in the morning.  Kevin McGowan, a crow expert at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, says crows have been gathering in traveling street parties for millions of years.  “They aren’t big, evil gangs of creatures bent on destruction.  They’re happy-go-luck birds trying to raise a family and enjoying what they do.”  

How can I not include here the words that Robert Frost recited once when asked what was his favorite of all his poems.

THE DUST OF SNOW

The way a crow

shook down on me

the dust of snow

from a hemlock tree

has given my heart

a change of mood

and saved some part

of a day I had rued.