Encore crows

Many of my friends have commented on a video I sent out about crows yesterday. I wonder if much of our identification with crows is associated with Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”. I have lost my all time favourite shot a crow flying straight at me and hope perhaps my daughter Emily still has a copy for she is a crow aficionado. If there is anything you need to know about crows she is the “go to person”. 

Clever crows are gregarious, and live in family groups of up to fifteen members. In most families the young crows help their parents raise further broodings. Juvenile crows will stay in the family unit for up to five years. They will not mate until they are two years old.  Three to seven eggs, with four or five being the average, are laid in a large nest (over half a metre in diameter and twenty three centimetres high) prepared in a crotch of a tree. The outer part of the nest is made mostly of dead branches but it is the interior “cup” made of softer material where the eggs are laid.  The eggs vary in colour and pigment even in a single clutch from bluish green to pale olive, marked with brown and gray but can be unmarked sky blue.

We see crows on the roadsides forging on the fallen, however, interestingly enough to me, their beaks are not strong enough to break the skin of mammals. They have to wait until some event or other scavenger has made the way clear to softer tissues. This is perhaps too much information so I will lighten up!

Our territorial ebony creatures maintain their collective territory year round, however individuals frequently leave to join large flocks at dumps and fields and sleep in large roosts in the winter. Records show up to two million crows in a roost. Now that is a murder of crows!

Over to crows: