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| Native American Crow Carving Courtesy Judy Wunsch |
SUSAN CLOKE
Columnist, Santa Monica Mirror
Crow
complaints are on the rise in Santa Monica. Neighbors are complaining about early morning loud noise,
crows carrying away fledglings from other bird’s nests, crows frightening off other
birds, crows eating garbage and crows making messes.
Complaints
about crows are not new.
Throughout history crows have been labeled schemers, pests, scavengers,
tricksters and, even omens of death. Remember the ominous crows in the classic movie, Alfred
Hitchcock’s The Birds?
Crows
live in large flocks, called “a murder.”
This poetic name was recorded in a 1486 essay on hunting, attributed to
Dame Juliana Berners, published in the Book of Saint Albans. In it, she lists the names of groups of
animals. Ravens and crows get the
harshest names. A flock of crows is a ‘murder of crows’ and a flock of ravens
is an ‘unkindness of ravens.’
Very
harsh compared with flock names such as, an ‘exaltation of larks’, a ‘charm of
goldfinch’, a ‘parliament of owls’, an ‘ostentation of peacocks’, a ‘congregation
of plovers’, and a ‘pandemonium of parrots’.
Crows are highly intelligent
animals. They make and use tools,
recognize individual people by their facial features, and crow vocalizations
are being studied as a possible language.
Crow intelligence has been recognized
in myth and folklore. Crows were
tricksters and ancient ancestors in Aboriginal Australian lore, they were
associated with the Irish goddess Morrigan, a crow speaks to Apollo in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, crows are considered ancestors in Hinduism, crows are mentioned
in the Buddhist Tibetan disciplines, a crow is said to have protected the first
Dalai Lama when he was a baby.
A Native
American story tells of the beautiful to hear and see Rainbow Crow who received
fire from the Creator and brought it back to earth on a burning stick. The stick charred his feathers and
turned the crow black and the smoke and heat of the fire turned his voice
hoarse. The crow is honored
because he brought fire to keep people warm.
Garry
George, Conservation Chair for Los Angeles Audubon,
said, “We’ve enabled the crow. Their
natural habitat is on open plains with trees for nesting. We’ve replicated that, to a degree,
when we changed the coastal desert ecology of Southern California and planted
large, open expanses of grass along with large and well-pruned trees and installed
sprinklers.
“But crows are predators. They eat fledging birds at the
seashore, including least terns, sandpipers, herons and egrets. Audubon would like to see people taking
appropriate actions to reduce the incentive for crows to be in our urban
areas.”
From the PBS video “A Murder of Crows” we
learn about the work of John Mazluff, Wildlife Biologist at the University of
Washington, who experimented with crow identification of individual
people. He was able to show that crows
could not only recognize individual people but could pass that information on to
their fledglings. We also see the
New Caledonian crows solving spatial problems in order to make tools and to use
those tools to get food.
Crows are omnivores who will eat anything
from insects, worms, grasshoppers, fruits and nuts, grains, seeds, crops and
fish to fledglings, eggs from other bird’s nests, garbage we leave out, dog or
cat food left outdoors and all carrion.
If they survive the first few years, and
the estimate is that fewer than 50% do, crows can live as long as 20 years.
They reach sexual maturity between 3 and 5 years of age, usually mate for life,
the mother and father crow and siblings from previous seasons, called ‘helpers
at the nest’ take care of the crow fledglings. Crows spend up to 5 years with their parents and family.
“There were always American Crows in this
area,” said Kimball Garrett, Ornithologist at the Los Angeles County Museum of
Natural History. “When the area
was largely agricultural the crows that where here were persecuted and shot
because they ate the crops. The
crows developed fears and learned to avoid humans.
“When LA become populated, people changed
the ecology of the LA basin by planting large expanses of lawns and installing
irrigation systems and fountains and pools, by planting many trees. People left
dog and cat food outside for their pets.
People didn’t properly dispose of garbage.
“As people made the urban areas more
habitable for themselves they also made them more attractive to crows. We created an environment that was good
for the crows. These changes to the natural habitat allowed
an artificial growth in the crow population.”
The crows are now happy here and if
reducing their urban presence is our goal, it won’t be easy. There are some obvious things to do. We
can be very careful about our garbage, throwing nothing out the window of a
car, throwing nothing on the ground, making sure that all garbage is in secure
containers. We can feed our dogs
and cats indoors.
Or we could do what the City of Chatham,
Canada did and bring in a falconer.
He used his trained hawks to capture, but not hurt, the crows. Then he released them and the crows did
what came naturally to them - they spread the news that there were predators in
town. The crows decided it was too
dangerous to stick around.
Or we could take the advice of those who
say crows are amazing and intelligent and interesting and we could decide to
like them.
I’m going to do a little of both. My dog food is coming off the porch and
into the house. I’ll let my dog
out to bark at the crows if they become a nuisance at my house. And, as a long time environmentalist, I’ll continue to be
careful and dispose of all trash correctly.
And I’m going to look at them in a new
way. I learned so much about crows
just through doing the research for this article that I already have a new
appreciation for them. And, I
wonder, is it really true that they take care of their elderly parents?
What Say You?
