CHASING CROWS…  The poetic term for a bunch of crows is a "murder."  No scientist calls them that, only poets and people who regularly do crossword puzzles. Scientists would call it a flock.  The Oxford English Dictionary suggests the term “murder” of crows dates back the 15th century with a statement about “a morther of crowys.”  In Middle English “morther” was the word for “murder.”

Every day just before sundown hundreds of crows, maybe thousands, fly together eastward from somewhere, perhaps everywhere, northeast of the place where I live just off Ulric Street above Friars Road in Mission Valley. For a few minutes every late afternoon they are a moving black-spotted spectacle above the valley.  Our hill has seen a great jump in crow population in the past ten years, and our crows join the mass migration every night and have returned to the hill by noon every day.  I learned today that as the sun sets, our crows join a group flying to willow trees on the east end of Lake Hodges, the county’s largest roosting site.  Last night I noticed for the first time a flyover of crows above Park Boulevard between Hillcrest and North Park.  Those city crows joined up with the group flying from the northwest.

Crows have been doing this daily gathering for millions of years, but their adoption of San Diego is a fairly new phenomenon.  The crow population, like the homeless person population, in San Diego has at least quadrupled in the past ten years with no end in sight to growth. Crows and people apparently like easy scavenging for food... and, of course, ideal weather for roosting.

I'll try in the next few days to get pictures of the evening migration.

Below are pictures I got today of other creatures who live on our hill.  

As far as I know, they stay the night.