My earliest crow memory: Age six, waking up in the middle of the night to the sounds of chaos, and finding my mother in her babydoll pyjamas, chasing a crow around the kitchen with a broom.
My second earliest crow memory: Age nine, watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds with my mother and sister. It scared the crap out of me.
My son’s earliest crow memory is probably visiting a greenhouse near Arnprior when he was about seven – a crow flew over to him, landed at his feet, fixed a beady black eye on him and started speaking to him in English.
This past January, I saw a huge murder of crows from Merivale Road. They were flying maybe 30 abreast, and they stretched from one horizon to the other. There were thousands of them.
I’ve mentioned crows on my blog a few times, so now I get a lot of people coming here in search of information about the massive crow congregations in Ottawa. In fact, according to Google Analytics, “crows, ottawa” is the sixth most common google search that brings people here. So, being the responsive blogger that I am, I’ve been trying to figure out what is going on with the crows. Yesterday I even went on a field trip!
According to Elizabeth LeGeyt, the Ottawa Citizen’s bird columnist,
“[crows] are gregarious at this time coming together, often in large numbers, to nightly roosts. The Ottawa birds use the trees around the General Hospital campus and have done for several years now. The crows leave the roost in the morning, fanning out around the area in search of food. In the late afternoon, they return along established flight lines, often stopping at a few pre-roosting places. At dusk, they return to the primary roost and settle down for the night.”
I happen to think crows’ roosts are fascinating. Nobody seems to know exactly why they gather together at night. Protection? Sex? Socializing? Just to freak people out?
The largest crows’ roost is in Fort Cobb, Oklahoma: it is estimated to hold over two million crows!
Not everybody likes crows’ roosts. In 2005, the City of Chatham, Ontario, paid $60,000 to get rid of their crows. Crow extermination has a long and icky history. There’s even a Crow Hunters Superstore. With recipes. They display their hate mail proudly on their website.
Anyway, yesterday after work a friend swung by and picked me up to go check out the roost near the General Hospital. We couldn’t find it, but on our way back we just happened to stumble across the pre-roost at Billings Bridge. Apparently big gangs of crows spend the late afternoons in the pre-roosts at Billings Bridge, the Experimental Farm, and Vincent Massey Park, and then head over to the General Hospital roost for the night. I think the reason we didn’t find the main roost was because we were an hour too early.
Either that or I’m just not very observant. I wanted to watch the lunar eclipse last night too, but I couldn’t find the moon.
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Is it weird that as this loaded onto my computer, my TV was showing a weird little Alfred Hitchcock plug for The Birds on Turner Classic Movies? And up pops Tippi Hedren on my computer screen….spoooooky.
On the one hand, I don’t really care for crows. Their call is ear-scraping and they’re annoying cocky. But on the other, their morning calls coming in through an open window are so strongly associated with summer for me, that it makes me happy to hear (at the beginning of spring/summer – by the end, it happens way too early in the morning to be pleasant).
Our family has seen the pre-roosts outside the experimental farm, and it was awe-inspiring. If that was the smaller congregation, well….
I remember the crow in the apartment at Larch very well…dont remember the babydolls though. Watching The Birds while cuddled up with Mom on the “davenport” at Bayshore is a fearsome memory too. I am not so fond of crows now, but I love the small birds.
I love crows. In Hamilton where I used to live, they would roost on the in the trees of the Niagara Escarpment (lovingly call “the mountain” by Hamiltonians) I’d ride the bus up the mountain from the Lower City and marvel at them. It’s awesome when they all take flight at once.
They also used to hang out in one of the trees in the park that lay between my house and my ex’s apartment. I used to pass by it everytime I went ot visit him and at dusk they made quite the cacophony. Of course, I was more interested in the army of squirrels that followed me through the park (I use to share my apples with them)
Is that Tippi Hedren one foxy broad, or what? I always admired the way she was able to maintain her glossy chignon through all those nasty crow attacks while others weren’t even able to hang on to their eyes.
I am so glad someone else is as fascinated by the crows as I am! We live across the Rideau River from the General Hospital campus, and I can tell you exactly how to find the crows’ winter roost there: you have to go past the main entrances to the campus, to the next left-hand turn-off on Smyth Rd. This will take you into a largish parking lot, from which you’ll be able to see the roost. You’re probably right that you were too early, but if you watch the crows down near Billings Bridge, at some point they’ll start to fly en masse toward the General Campus roost — usually just before dusk. It reminds me of the scene in Harry Potter with the owls. Incidentally, if my friends and family didn’t already think I was a bit potty with all the knitting and suchlike, my fascination with urban crow behaviour would seal the deal for them. Nice to find someone else with similarly esoteric interests.
On their way “out”, on Wednesday mornings, they check the trash (pick-up morning) in our neighbourhood. The problem with crows is that they scare the crap out of smaller birds and raid the feeder. Sorry, guys. The McFeeder is closed.
I ADORE all the corvids! I posted about the blue jay roosts across the street from me, but we also have just TONS of crows and a huge number of ravens here. Its WONDERFUL. They’re so smart. They’ve done intelligence tests with them and they do as well as apes on them. They have reasoning skills :-).
Some of you love crows too! I read this book once called Bird Brains and it was all abobut the intelligence of crows, ravens, jays and magpies. Interesting book, great pix too.
Karen – many thanks for the directions. I’ll give it another try!
CG – I love the sound of crows, though 10,000 of them early in the morning might scrape on my nerves a little. 😉
This is from the Crow Hunting site: “The crow is the most intelligent of all birds in North America. As such, they can be a challenging and worthy adversary…”
Only someone who thought hunting crows is time well spent could consider them a “worthy adversary”. A friend of mine filmed a huge murder/flock of crows near the Suites on Somerset down in Hintonburg this past summer…
youtube.com/watch?v=4JW_Ud1FaqU
Personally the only crow I’ve ever wanted to kill was the one which lived just outside my bedroom window when I lived in Etobicoke… every morning at 4:45am it started telling the world it was awake. Other than that b*stard I’m cool with them… I actually like their call, just not next to my bedroom window.
I also found this on ESPN.com, it’s a column by a regular writer about hunting crows for the first time:
“Before the crows wised up, we had killed a dozen, and I found myself hooked on crow hunting, a sport that until that day had been as unfamiliar to me as hunting tigers in India.”
Yikes.
My dog likes to go out at dusk and chase the crows in flight.
She was a farm puppy living near Lake Ontario, and must have run through the fields chasing big birds overhead.
In summer, the crows fly from West to East and roost in the trees near the General Hospital. One evening I drove up Billings Ave. at Lynda Lane, and there were hundreds of crows standing on the ground. They just walked aside and made space for me to drive through them. The dog would not get out of the car that evening.
Now, in winter, the crows are flying east to west. There is a roost at Brookfield Rd. and the Aviation Parkway (trees by the Health Canada building there).
Gabriel, I saw that video a few days ago – I thought it was from the pre-roost at Billings. Those hunting quotes are so bizarre. I’m not sure I want to understand that mentality – which is weird, because I want to understand almost everything!
Quill – that’s freaky about the crows parting to give you a path and the dog choosing not to get out of the car!
The crows are flying to the General Hospital from the east now?? Is it a seasonal rotation or is this the first time you’ve witnessed it? Thanks for the tips for my next field trip.
Yep, sorry, Bank and Riverside, Russell moved… when I was a mid-teen we (me, my brother and mom) went to Disney Florida. In the hotel parking lot a random dude helped my mom with some luggage and when he found out we were Canadian he started telling us about his hunting life. I’m half-rural so I have a lot of people in my life who hunt bear, moose, deer and so on, so when he said “hunting” I was kind of expecting some grand story about a week long struggle between him, armed only with a knife, versus a pack of three-legged half-grizzly half-cougar beasts… but then he started on about Blue Jays and Sparrows and Doves. Thing is, he was telling us about blowing birds away with a small shotgun as a way of Impressing us with tales of his hunting prowess… almost as though he was doing it to feed his family. I guess once you get off the main road of any subculture and get into the sub-subcultures Every thing just gets weirder and weirder…
Crows’ roosts are called rookeries. In Europe the crows have grey bodies and black heads and wings.
[…] of the things I love about them. (Long-term readers might recall I’ve blogged about crows before. Here and here and here. […]
Crows are attracted to electromagnetic fields. They have increased in urban centers since the 90’s because EMFs have increased during the same time period. In Japan, they have been known to attack high voltage wires and in India, fibre optic wires. With regards to Chatham, Ontario, many broadcast towers were installed during this period.
The food scraps they are eating in cities are incidental, not the main attraction. There are food scraps in a lot of cities, but the crows are selective. Bats and bees use the earth’s magnetic fields for navigation and EMF interferes with this, but crows simply do not like EMF and will caw loudly at a high EMF (if this happens to you, test yourself with a gaussmeter. do you have body metal that may conduct more emf?)
Perhaps their job is not to “dry up the waters,” but to get rid of the waves. I wonder what effect, if any, crows have on EMF levels?
Elektra, thanks for commenting. That’s fascinating. Kind of scary too. How do you know this stuff?
there are 1000’s of crows gathering in pembroke something is happening, this means something…………….east end by the water tower every night, 1000’s of crows.send someone to help…………….over
Saw 10,000 crows last night, thought I was going mental. Absolutely beautiful and unnerving at the same time.
Where did you see them Gypsy??
I see them every night now that I leave work. I work on Blair near Olgilvie and drive home via the Innes on ramp, on Innes. There are thousands upon thousands at them as they all move together. They rest on the trees near the Innes off ramp. I’m sure they move along again but I’mm home by then!
Glad to know hubby and I aren’t the only ones always wondering about the crows!
Enjoyed reading all these notes. I have for years watched these crows flying east from Walkley and St. Laurent and wondered where they went in such large numbers. This past October I was a patient and the General and lo and behold here they came. I spent my evenings and early morning watching them come and go. Would love to be able to go and walk around them.
Sharon, we went and checked out Innes Road – there were quite a few there, though I suspect we were too early in the afternoon for the real show. We’ll go back another time – Thanks for the tip!
Helen, I’ve heard that there’s a roost out by the General, and I’d like to go check it out sometime. (I did go once, but they weren’t there then – I expect they spend the evenings and nights there, and then head west again in the morning.) It’s definitely a thrill to walk amongst them when there are thousands. I hope you can do it sometime….even to sit quietly amongst them is an experience.
Thanks for the good hunting hints. I appreciate it. Thanks again!