Hey, check out this kickstarter for a crow-watching app for kids. Just imagine — your kids can get a little structured education in biological science outside of the classroom, get a little exercise, and have fun even in a pandemic.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I remember a documentary on PBS (maybe it was A Murder of Crows?) which, among other things, discussed research at UW (Seattle…we have to specify now) examining the crow’s ability to communicate. It compared most favorably with, say, the entire Trump family, although that’s a pretty low threshold to clear.
@Sean Boyd, I don’t think I saw the documentary but did read in a book how many years ago a UW researcher climbed a local tree and inspected the eggs in an active crow’s nest while wearing a Nixon mask. Of course the nesting parents were livid. And now those parents are long dead but generations of crows later, whenever someone walks around campus with a Nixon mask, the crows go berserk. They have orally communicated down through the ages that that guy is some kind of crook.
Crows are smart and they can do all kinds of things. For example, they can have a nice chilly day on the beach during the darkest part of the year.
I love watching and photographing crows. They do photogenic things fairly often and their walk is slightly pompous-looking.
No crows here. Lots of ravens though. The don’t bring me gifts or scold me, but they do stomp around on my chimney’s flue cover and make the oddest sounds I’ve ever heard come out of birds.
@ imback #2:
Why do I have a sudden desire to buy a Trump mask and go annoy a bunch of crows?
I have been following Prof. Marzluff’s work on crows since I was a student in his department at U of Wash in the late 1990’s. He joined what was then the College of Forest Resources during my last year. I heard he was an interesting guy and a great lecturer. The most fun thing I have gotten from his work with the city crows is that now matter how carefully we think we are studying them, they are watching us even more thoroughly.
@#2, imback:
Ah, that shows their superiority. Humans couldn’t even go a decade without trying to rehabilitate the reputation of George W. Bush — he’s such a funny guy, he shared a candy with Michelle Obama, how human! Look, he’s giving awards to minorities! So what if he spent $2 trillion to get a million people killed for made-up reasons, and then oversaw a global financial crash? Crows wouldn’t be taken in like that, they know what’s what.
I love crows. They are so intelligent and comical, especially when they are strutting around. We have a bird feeder with cracked corn for them, and I often put out bread heels as well. Recently found a shiny nail in one of our birdbaths, so I’m thinking a crow left it as a gift – lovely!
We had a crow stalking our cat once. And I don’t mean, “we saw a crow near our cat a lot.” I mean, this crow had dedicated its life to hating our cat.
When our cat went outside, the crow would follow it around, crowing from rooftops. It would ignore other cats, focusing solely on ours.
Occasionally, it would swoop on our cat – she came home with scratched ears a few times, and we saw at least two attempts ourselves.
Then, one day our cat had a little bit of something else’s blood on her fur, and we didn’t see the crow anymore…
Some crows in Japan have learned how crack nuts by waiting until the pedestrian light turns green and then putting the nut on the road.
After a car has crushed the nut, they wait for the next green to collect the content.