I have a simple formula to double the birds in your life: listen to the crows.
They are probably the most frequently ignored birds in the country, although in some ways they are a strange bird to overlook. The corvid family contains the most intelligent and socially complex birds of North America, which one might think would make them objects of interest and admiration. American crows are the great generalists of the group, with a continent-spanning range even wider than that of their larger cousins the ravens, which, while not rare in California, are less enamored of human proximity — crows are the default corvid in urban and suburban settings.
I see ravens some days. Every day, I see crows. I see them from my window at home, and out in the parking lot at work. They perch in the trees, flap to the rooftop, walk on the pavement and hop out of the way of approaching cars with one foot held in front of the other, imperturbably wrapped up in an insouciant lack of panic, as if they were performing some playful trotting that I’ve been too serious for since third-grade gym class.
Why look at crows? Because I am accompanied by black feathers, watched by black eyes and discussed by black beaks everywhere I go. To ignore their constant conversation would be to enclose myself within a bubble every time I step outside, to be an always-indoor person, whether inside of doors or not.
I have only a mild interest in encouraging people to go out looking for birds. The more valuable revelation is that birds already surround you.
Unlike some of the other frequently scorned birds of urban places like pigeons or house sparrows, crows have always been in California. But while modern human settlement displaced innumerable animals, crows have thrived alongside us. I see more of these birds today than native Californians did 500 years ago.
At that time, California’s crows were less abundant and more thinly distributed, without today’s urban concentrations. Indigenous stories view them ecologically as scavengers, while the early centuries of European colonization considered them primarily as agricultural pests. Crows were accused of stealing eggs, blinding newborn livestock and above all, feeding in great flocks on fields of corn and grains.
In the 20th century, crows’ concentration in agricultural areas was replaced by migration to urban areas, where human-provisioned food is even more reliable. They like what we do. We create clearings in forests, found irrigated oases in deserts and plant lawns for foraging and trees for nesting into drained wetlands.
In the 1930s, a winter survey estimated a California-wide population of 82,000 crows, spread among a number of rural roost sites. By the 1980s, all reported roosts were in urban locations, with a single roost in Yuba City estimated at 1 million crows. One million crows!
Their movement to the towns and cities has been encouraged by some drawbacks of the farmlands, most notably shooting and disease. In the United States’ more agricultural past, anti-crow vitriol was more widely lethal. Governments and gun manufacturers sponsored crow hunts. Winter roosts were dynamited until the 1940s, killing tens of thousands of birds at a time. The result was not so much crow eradication as crow relocation. They moved to town, where trigger-readiness is much lower.
In more recent decades, the great threat to crows has been the advent of mosquito-transmitted West Nile virus, to which they are more vulnerable than any other bird in California. After the disease arrived here in the mid-2000s, one survey on mostly agricultural routes in the Sacramento Valley saw declines of 63% in crow counts from the 1990s, with the largest decreases in areas of mosquito-rich rice cultivation and lowest in areas of human habitation and associated vector control. For crows, the cities are safer from disease as well.
Now a day without those black beaks cawing is a strange and empty silence and an aberration in my life. We are not alone and separate, the unique possessors of these streets. We’ve also built this place for crows, who prosper here among us. We live within a double city, a town of people and a town of crows.
Jack Gedney’s On the Wing runs every other Monday. He is a co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Novato, leads walks and seminars on nature in Marin, and blogs at Nature In Novato. You can reach him at jack@natureinnovato.com.
