A Crescendo of Crows

As evening falls, the crows arrive.

First just two or three. Then clusters of half a dozen or more. Calling, cawing, the crows wing their way over our house, a black arrow of birds pointing to the west.

The crows look purposeful, and they are. They are heading home from a day spent gleaning in fields, parks, and city streets to roost for the night at the UW Bothell campus, along with  more than 10,000 others of their kind.

My husband and I headed there, too, one recent evening to watch for their arrival. The sky was that wash of pink and blue peculiar to midwinter dusk, with purple shades of night seeping in around the edges.

And then the pink and blue became speckled with bits of black. From all directions, the crows came, from Seattle and Sultan, from Snohomish and Skykomish. Their cawing grew from a few raucous cries to a seething, swirling wall of sound.

Crows perched on the roof and in the trees. Late arrivals gathered on the grass before looking for spaces in the crowd. Clusters of crows would startle and fling themselves into the air, making the constant crow-clatter rise and fall, swoop and turn.

The crows aren't here to feed. Nor are they hatching plans to conquer the human race. They're simply seeking safety in numbers.

By nightfall, they'll all be tucked into the willow trees and other vegetation growing thickly in the wetlands on campus. It's a slumber party inspired by a mutual desire to not get picked off by a hungry great horned owl.

These highly social and smart birds have a lot to say before settling down for the night. Who knows what they're sharing as they caw, cackle, and squawk?

By the time we left, the crows had vacated the rooftops. A few stragglers flew in, making straight for the trees; it was easy to imagine they were stealing glances over their shoulders, convinced that an owl was just a few flaps behind them.

At sunrise, the crows will awaken, stretch, and fly off for another day of scavenging, socializing, preening, and playing. Many will head for familiar places while some may be inspired to tag after other birds and find new feeding grounds.

By late spring, the crows will disperse throughout the region, busy with mating, nesting, and raising young. They'll stay in their home territories throughout the summer. In fall, all the crows--youngsters on up to crows that have been around for 30 or 40 years--will resume trekking to the campus to roost in the trees.

As the Crow Flies

I am exhausted at the mere thought of writing about crows despite the fascination they hold for me. These intelligent, intriguing birds have been so thoroughly and splendidly covered in recent years, online and in books, by authors and scientists that I think the best thing to do is simply refer people to these sources and just add my own poor anecdotes and images to the growing body of literature and imagery.

It's almost impossible not to notice crows in late summer, autumn, and winter in our area: They appear as an endless frieze of silhouettes streaming across the sky at sunset to communal rookeries, where they settle in for the night while making a huge ruckus.

In Seattle, the crows flew east over our house in the evening en route to a rookery on Foster Island in the botanical gardens near the University of Washington. Here in the Woodinville area, more than 10,000 crows flock at the UW's Bothell campus. Clearly these are brainy birds if they feel most at home in the vicinity of institutions of higher learning. (Video here.)

I've noticed that crows in Seattle are much less suspicious of humans than crows here in rural King County. In Seattle my dog and I could stroll within five feet of a foraging crow and it would merely pause in its poking at the ground to keep an eye on us.

Crows in Cottage Lake, however, fly off when we're still 20 feet or so away. With fewer people per block, and even fewer walking on local streets, I guess the crows haven't had as many encounters with people as city crows. (It's not farm country, so it's not that they've learned to associate humans with gunshot.)

Just about everybody has a crow anecdote. My first one involved attempting to rescue a blue-eyed baby crow fledgling who was sitting in the road right under my friend C.'s car tire, gazing up at us trustingly as we tried to shoo him to safety while his parents screamed overhead. I finally had to scoop up the little guy to deposit him on the sidewalk.

My thank-you consisted of being dive-bombed by the furious pair of crows and having my head pecked and my hair pulled. Plus they yelled and cawed at me every time I returned to that spot, which I had to do just about every day since it was outside my kid's elementary school. (Crows have been shown to have keen facial recognition skills.)

Another story involves coming home to find about 75 crows perched on the roof of our Seattle house and in the branches of our trees, all hollering their heads off. Unfortunately, I eagerly shot pictures of the bald eagle sitting on a telephone pole across the street calmly eating a pigeon (the focus of the crows' fury) instead of the crows. Looking back, I think the mass of crows would've been a far better picture.

Just a scant few of the crows harassing the bald eagle.

Crows also enjoyed sipping water out of the gutters of our home and prying up wads of moss on the roof to eat the dainties hiding beneath it. They also discovered that the weephole in our curb, which channeled a rivulet from an underground stream into the street, was a great place to dip food items to soften them and congregated there regularly.

Crows are always on the lookout for easy pickings, and city crows learned long ago that local playgrounds are full of untidy children and untended picnics. When the Resident Teen was small, she stood aghast in the playground near the Woodland Park Zoo, watching as a crow grabbed our paper bag containing a bagel and flew off with it. Bagels are heavy, however, so I became the lunchtime hero by chasing the crow, which dropped the bag so it could gain elevation and escape.

This one seized upon some unguarded pizza at the playground
during an elementary-school picnic a few years ago.

Crows nested in our old neighborhood, and when their babies fledged and spent a few days shuffling around on the ground as they learned to fly, the parent birds would attack us in our garden. We learned to go outside holding a broom above our heads, not to swat the protective mom and dad but just to keep them at bay. Everybody was much happier when the youngsters learned to fly. Then they'd sit on the power lines, where the young birds would wail pathetically for food and generally torment their parents.

Junior is the blue-eyed bird on the right
with the gaping, insatiable red maw.

My most recent crow encounter was a bird who defied my earlier statement that Cottage Lake crows are more wary than Seattle crows (exception proves the rule, and all that). This one landed on the handle of my grocery cart when I returned to my car with my purchases.

"What did you get? Anything for me?"

Then he jumped into the back of the station wagon when I opened the hatchback to load it. He pecked up some spilled grain and then proceeded to try and open the grocery bags, at which point I shooed him out. He sat on the hood waiting for me to come back after returning my cart. Once I was in the car, he hopped on to the side mirror to pierce me with a gaze and see if he couldn't stare me into giving him some handouts.

We've had lots of lovely birds visit our new garden, but so far crows have only dropped in once. I hope they'll be paying us some more visits because I find them endlessly entertaining.

Crows bravely whooping it up at Woodland Park Zoo,
pilfering pumpkin right from under the noses of the grizzly bears

Some great crow books:
Bird Brains by Candace Savage
Gifts of the Crow by John Marzluff and Tony Angell
In the Company of Crows and Ravens by John Marzluff, Paul Ehrlich, and Tony Angell
Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys by Candace Savage
Mind of the Raven [the crow's cousin] by Bernd Heinrich

Some cool crow videos:
National Geographic "Clever Crows" 2-minute film
Nature's "A Murder of Crows"
Crow fashions hook out of hairpin to get food from a tube

Crow winkling critters out of shells, Carkeek Park

Boo to You, Too

Jack o' lantern from 2010 .

Very behind on Halloween this year.

Scrambled to assemble small bowl of candy for the lone trick-or-treater who might show up.

Pumpkins are sitting on the front steps, uncarved.

No time to make barmbrack, the traditional Irish yeasted raisin-studded bread that's also stippled with fortune-telling treats such as a silver coin and a ring.

No time to make the Halloween costume I'd thought up this time last year but did nothing about for the next 364 days.

No decorations. Not like in past years, when even the cats got into the spirit of things.

We did manage to stop at a pumpkin farm, though instead of scouring vast fields for Just the Right Pumpkin, indulging in hot apple cider, and then paying a buck to stuff a small pumpkin into a Pumpkin Cannon and send it flying hundreds of yards across a field and into a marsh, we spent just 10 minutes looking among a selection near the parking lot.

We used to pour a lot more energy into Halloween: there was all the excitement of helping our daughter put together a costume and showing up at the elementary school Halloween parade (I am astonished, but delighted, that the school was able to continue this tradition, as a hurricane of objections with winds blowing from vastly different ideological directions have caused it to be abolished in many places).

And twice we turned the basement into a haunted house, complete with a maze of paths, flickering lights, spooky noises, a bubbling cauldron, dry ice fog, and once, a computerized brain that answered kids' questions (the brain behind the creepy image being my brother's creative mind).


Oh well. My daughter has at least gotten into the Halloween spirit and went to school dressed as a cowgirl, wearing a white hat bordered with silver sequins. And Mother Nature has not stinted on seasonal decor.

A Halloween display of gourds at local supermarket

Local crows

Eerie moonlight

Big fat autumn garden spiders

Marsh Meander at Magnuson, May 2012

Magnuson Park in Seattle was once a Navy airfield. Today, it's the site of a 350-acre park complete with lakefront beaches, grassy hills, sports fields, and many old buildings currently being used as offices or awaiting reconstruction for new purposes. Thankfully, some areas that were once concrete have been recreated as wild lands, including a beautiful marsh that weaves through areas of brush and woodland.

It's hard to believe that the artificial playing-field surface east of it functions as a forest floor, allowing water to percolate gently down to the marsh, but it does. The piping of the Pacific chorus frogs who've made the marsh their home is a testament to that.

We went for a walk through the marsh on a sunny afternoon recently, on one of the first spring days that even hinted that you could take off your jacket and sling it over your shoulder halfway through the hike. But the birds have been reveling in spring for weeks despite the gray skies, as evidenced by all the busy bug-gathering, stick-collecting, and singing going on.

Male gadwall swimming among reeds

Male flicker hunting for ants and other insects in the grass

Male redwing blackbird keeps an eye on his territory

I'm pretty sure this is a savannah sparrow, based on markings and song, plus they're on record as living here. This would be a first sighting for me...yay!

This crow harassed a red-tailed hawk mercilessly, but interestingly nobody came to his assistance...usually crows pour in to mob a predator. Crows are highly intelligent, so we wondered if perhaps all the other crows were thinking, "Oh, that's just our stupid neighbor yelling his head off about harmless old Harry the Hawk, who never goes after anything but rabbits and voles. Just ignore him." The hawk was certainly unimpressed by his heckler.

Feather Weather

Lots of "brrrrdies" showing up at the feeders now that the temperatures have dipped into the teens here in our usually maritime-moderated habitat. Everything from big cottony snowflakes to nasty pellets of graupel fell on us in the last 48 hours.

Very little of it stuck (just enough to require vigorous scraping of windshields in the morning and careful foot placement while going down outdoor stairs), but the accompanying cold has driven a raccoon into taking shelter beneath our tarp-covered picnic table, most likely has encouraged the #@!* rat to sneak into the engine of my Subaru again (reminder to self: bang on hood), and fortunately for us, has sent hungry, feather-fluffed birds to the feeders outside the window.

This year has seen the return of house finches--we used to have tons of these pretty birds here until a Cooper's hawk moved into the neighborhood, so I'm glad now to have both hawk and finches in the area again. This male-female pair has stopped by every day and yesterday were accompanied by two other males:

A few years ago, Bewick's wrens turned up in the neighborhood--perhaps their tendency to flit about low to the ground and through shrubs helped them evade hawks and establish a foothold in our garden. I love these little guys--they're very brave and feisty, sing prettily and loudly, and growl a loud, buzzing call that clearly says "shove off" when they see a dog, a cat, or anybody else they don't like.

This little wren asserts himself at both the suet and the sunflower seed feeder, refusing to let the brawnier finches and sparrows and the little-tough-guy chickadees push him around:

We've also had normally ground-feeding juncos perching on the suet feeder (they must have been inspired by the rest of the gang) and visits from a ruby-crowned kinglet (a new species on both my lame life list and at our feeder). Yesterday, another brand-new bird showed up--I'm pretty sure it's the "Myrtle" form of the yellow-rumped warbler (charmingly also known as the butterbutt). If so, perhaps it's a harbinger of spring on the way as migrants pick their way north for the breeding season, despite the mercury's plunge south.

I am also pleased to see that Edward Scissorbill, the neighborhood crow with the misshapen beak, has survived the winter and is once again surveying his kingdom from his utility-line perch with his mate at his side (she was too coy to stick around for this picture).

Frozen Birds (and We're Not Talkin' Turkey)

A house finch contemplates the menu. We used to have lots
of these pretty finches in our summer garden, but they vanished
after a Cooper's hawk began frequenting the area, as did most of
the English sparrows. They pay us visits in winter, though.

The chickadees, juncos, and wrens who stuffed themselves at our feeders Tuesday morning got a much-needed energy boost to sustain them not only throughout the frigid day but also overnight, when temperatures dropped to a record-setting low for this date, settling in at a numbing 14 degrees Fahrenheit.

School was canceled for a second day in a row, which made for a lovely, dawdly sort of morning spent in PJs and bathrobe with a hot cup of coffee and the newspaper at hand. This slow time allowed for leisurely birdwatching at the feeders (which are stationed within easy viewing from the living room and kitchen windows; didn't want to actually go outside--that would be "brrr-watching").

And WHAT a ruckus there was. Somebody squealed and let slip that the eatin' was good in this little side yard, because there were many more birds and considerably more species tucking into the meal today.

English sparrows joined the crowd, shouldering aside the juncos at the suet feeder. A lone female Townsend's warbler slipped in among them briefly, her svelte form like a gazelle's in a herd of cape buffalo.

A strutting song sparrow showed up to claim his share along with three of his lady friends. A vivid male house finch perched to methodically consume sunflower seeds. The Bewick's wren seemed alarmed when he showed up; he looked disgusted by the commotion and huffed off like a gourmet irritated by commoners cramming into his favorite restaurant because it got a favorable review in The New York Times.

Plump, sated robin redbreast.

Meanwhile, the big suet feeder hanging from the birch tree near the kitchen window swayed violently under the three-pronged attack by a trio of hefty flickers. Above them, two dozen or so robins huddled on the birch's branches, puffed up to the size of grapefruits. They'd just completely stripped the cotoneaster bush of all its blood-red berries and were not just glutted but also, perhaps, a bit tipsy.

The appearance of a starling momentarily startled the small birds, but as he was interested only in digging his beak into the suet, they quickly returned to foraging. But when two crows showed up to see what all the fuss was about, that did it. Everybody scattered.

Everybody, that is, except the chickadees. They kept a wary eye on the crows (who didn't hang around long) but didn't stop grabbing seeds and fleeing to cache them elsewhere for use throughout the season. (I saw one tuck a seed securely behind the wooden frame of our neighbors' window.) It's not uncommon for a chickadee to cache upward of 100,000 seeds and other tidbits. If they were human,  they'd have been champion Green Stamp savers.

Here's the starling, resplendent in his winter finery of dark
feathers stippled with the stars that give the species its name. I
recently learned that the base of a male's beak is blue and a
female's is--yes, pink! When I blow up this photo, this bird's
beak looks blue at the base, so I'll go out on a suet feeder
and say he's a boy.

I'm thankful the birds all got a good meal under their feathers to help them get through another bone-chilling night, and that the only frozen birds around here are the two turkeys I got for free at a local grocery store and stuck into the freezer for cooking early next year, in an inspired bit of chickadee behavior on my part. (I thought of putting them behind the neighbor's window frame, but they wouldn't fit.)

Edward Scissorbill

Edward Scissorbill is a local crow who stands out from the crowd even if you're not inclined toward crow-watching due to his deformed beak. The upper and lower parts of his beak (the maxilla and mandible, respectively) cross over each other, rather like a red crossbill's beak. Considering how cleverly crows use their beaks to manipulate objects and access food, you'd think such a bird would have a very difficult time surviving.

But I suppose a smart, omnivorous bird like a crow, living in a tree-filled urban enclave where the only predators are free-ranging domestic cats and cars, isn't stymied by a little deformity like this. (Yes, it's true, a bear and a cougar have both been spotted in this part of town in the past two years, but neither of them kept the same hours as the crows.)

I first spotted Edward Scissorbill during a dreadful winter about two years ago while walking the dog up an icy hill a block from home. He was scuttling about in the street with two other crows. I thought, there's a crow that won't survive the winter. But the following autumn, walking up the same hill, I encountered him again. He was sitting on the roofbeam of a garage, fat and glossy and totally unafraid even though the dog and I were only about 10 feet from him.

By this time I'd become aware of a scientist in Alaska who is studying deformed bills in chickadees, crows, and other species, thanks to a tip from a scientist at the University of Washington who studies crow behavior. So I started keeping an eye out for Edward and bringing along my camera while walking. I finally snapped a picture of him as he stood on a rain barrel outside a neighbor's house.

He appears to be thriving and even has a mate--I spotted the two of them perched in a tree a block away, close to their shaggy, basketball-sized nest. There were a lot of young crows squawking and learning to fly in that area a few weeks back; I assume they are his kids. That may be assuming a lot, but then again, I'm assuming he's a he, for starters.

At any rate, he rules the roost in this little area--I often see him sitting on an overhead wire, surveying his domain, and he even occasionally stands on the street sign as if to make it clear exactly what his address is. I know he recognizes me and the dog, too, as he calmly and carefully watches us go by without shouting at the dog or fluttering out of our way. Crows are famous for their facial-recognition ability, so this isn't too much of a surprise. But I wonder what his nickname for us might be.

Front-row Seats at Cascade Lake Wildlife Dramas

We knew that a week of camping in the South End campground at Moran State Park on Orcas Island, Washington State, promised a plethora of wildlife sightings the minute we drove under the giant horseshoe of a sign that arches over the entryway: our first glimpse was of a Columbian blacktail deer whose standard-issue brown coat was splashed with puddles of white. By the time we'd reached our designated site, we'd already had our fill of deer, having passed three doe-fawn pairs who paused in their browsing only briefly to watch us go by.

Our site nestled on the very edge of Cascade Lake; we pitched our tent a dozen feet from the water. Then we sat on the vast, well-worn log separating land from lake, dangling our feet in the water.

Straight away, one of the many dragonflies skimming over the water swooped by to take a look at the newcomers in his territory. He hovered in front of us; the little probe droid certainly looked as if he were glowering. Then he was off to nab smaller insects and chase away larger intruders. Incredible, the dogfights waged among the dragonflies; I saw one dragonfly nearly drive another underwater.

This is, I think, an eight-spotted skimmer; the whitish tail, per
Audubon, indicates that it has become "gray with age" (one can
relate). These dragonflies' black-and-white wings made them
look like flying checkerboards as they flickered above the lake.

Dragonfly-watching is definitely enhanced by 90-degree weather. Early in the morning, their zipping, zigzagging flight through the mist over the water created an ethereal scene that I think could only be captured in watercolors; the slanting yellow beams of sunlight made jewels of their flickering wings.

Smaller damselflies, boldly striped in blue and black, also flitted over the water. When we floated out onto the lake in our ridiculous, polka-dotted, inflatable life preservers, the damselflies would perch on us as if we were nothing more than exotic, oversized lily pads. At one point, at least a dozen had settled on me, including a pair relaxing on my big toe. When a violinist practicing on shore began to play a pastoral piece, the Damselfly Club Med atmosphere was complete.

Temperatures dropped as the week progressed, and the dragons and damsels' activities subsided, but the wildlife show went on. A belted kingfisher rattled noisily from a perch nearby before her fishing expeditions; once she was chased in wide figure-eights around the lake by a pair of angry crows. An osprey hovered overhead one afternoon before folding his wings and diving into the water, then laboring skyward again with a fish clenched in his talons. Douglas's squirrels--red-bellied critters also known as chickarees--chuckled madly in the treetops and left middens of cone scales the length and breadth of the loop trail around the lake.

Some animals, of course, didn't hesitate to stroll right into our campsite, despite the presence of our large yellow Lab, Luna. A pair of cheeky song sparrows nearly perched on our knees to join us for morning oatmeal. A family of juncos, a bit more shy, foraged in an orbit around our table. A yellow warbler glowed briefly on a branch above us. Under cover of night, deer investigated the plastic bins that contained our food, as did raccoons. Fortunately for this timid camper, Orcas lacks bears, so one could get away with being quite careless with food--as long as you plonked a few heavy stones atop the cooler, furry bandits didn't make off with your meals.

This butterfly flew with all the grace of an intoxicated
tissue-paper flower. It stumbled and staggered all
over the place as if fighting a headwind even when
the air was still. Am pretty sure it's a pine white. The
Audubon field guide notes that "this strange white
normally flutters weakly, high among conifers" but flits
lower to sip nectar from flowers, as this one's doing.

Some birds were only heard, not seen; the yank-yank calls of red-breasted nuthatches tugged at the forest at dawn, and the fluting song of a Swainson's thrush spiraled through the trees at dusk. I also heard my first owl in the tomblike silence of 2 a.m.--the throbbing hoots of a great horned owl.

Best new-bird-for-the-list sighting: a merlin streaking after smaller birds by the water in the small town of Eastsound.

Didn't get to see the strange animal spied by my daughter while she was out on the trail one morning, though. Swept away by the beauty of the woods and the lake, she told us about all the wonderful things she'd seen, including "a mouse! The cutest little mouse! It had soft brown fur, and a long pink tail, and black eyes, and six cute little pink feet..."

"Six?" we asked, eyebrows raised.

She folded up with laughter as she realized what she'd said, knowing she was doomed; the "six-footed mouse" would now haunt her on all future camping trips. "How many feet did it have?" became the standard question to ask her after she spotted any animal after that.

Bump on a Blog

"How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring blog!"

(with apologies to Emily Dickinson)

Right. So here's the first blog post. OK. Here we go. (?) (Psst, what do I do now?) (Not sure. Just write something.) (What?) (Dunno.)

Well, since the first animal of many to be mentioned in this blog happens to be a frog, we'll just continue the frog theme and link it to something that's just as fine as frogs, namely, a book. Specifically, the book I'm reading right now, which is Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher.

This book was the inspiration for Scott Weidensaul's book Return to Wild America, in which he retraces the steps taken by Peterson and Fisher as they spent 100 days trekking 30,000 miles around North America, beginning in Newfoundland, looping through the United States and Mexico, and ending in Alaska's Pribilof Islands. My father gave me this book on Christmas 2005, and immediately I was seized with the desire to track down a nice copy of Wild America so as to read that first.

And as luck would have it, I found an original copy, first edition, for next to nothing at a local thrift store. Dustjacket and all.

The two travelers are just now wending their way through the mid-Atlantic states, and Fisher, who is from England, is listening in amazement to the spring peepers and other frogs, not quite believing Peterson when he tells them that "these sounds that pipe and trill from a hundred throats on evenings in spring are love songs of the swamp" made by frogs as they "bleat, trill, peep, click, quack, or croak."

No frogs calling in my city neighborhood, but spring is slowly nudging the garden back to life, and birds are flinging their energies into song; there's a scrappy Bewick's wren who alternates between warbling beautifully and letting loose with grating, angry buzzes; a few robins advising one and all to "cheer-up, cheerily," and a starling who sits on the roof beam pouring out notes while whirling his wings like a feathered wind-up toy. Saw a bushtit flit by with a beakful of fur for its hidden nest. Black-capped chickadees whirl from one birch tree to another, and the crows sit in judgment on the powerlines out front.

The vegetable starts are all in and have benefitted from several days of chilly rain interspersed with "sun breaks"--a weather term I never heard til I moved to the Pacific Northwest. There's one coming now--time to get outside.