Cspam Corvid Thread

The only thread where talking about murder is not just allowed, but mandatory

I'll start with an interesting article done by a crow researcher

A HORNY SWEARENGEN

How do I attract crows to my yard?

I know that you can befriend them by giving them food and shiny objects, and that sounds badass, but what's step one, getting them to come to your yard in the first place?

Facebook Aunt

Crows are known for scavenging battlefields. So leaving some corpses out should do it.

lumpentroll

Lessail

sorry i'm going to have to open a qcs thread about this

Dustcat

i used to live up north where crows were everywhere, but now i live in central texas where they're pretty rare, and while i don't consciously miss them, seeing or hearing one always makes me happy

here, there's a family of about four or five that's been living in a greenspace where i walk my dog for years, and every time i see them, i think "i should befriend these crows" but I don't know how to go about that. they're very aloof and skittish so just tossing bread crumbs around might not work. they're clearly doing okay for themselves anyway and might look down on my pittance of bread crumbs.

Vim Fuego

There are a pair of ravens that nest somewhere near my house. It's kind of weird, because I'm down at sea level and they are normally found at higher elevations. But it's cool too. You can hear their unique vocalizations, or see them flying around getting harassed by groups of crows.

Difference between crows and ravens

Also, in college there was a crow that hung out in the parking lot. It would perch on the street lights and imitate the car alarm/ unlocking beep noises. It was a very good mimic!

Helical Nightmares

Problem solving - Object Exploration in Kea and Crows

Researchers from our Department of Psychology have discovered that New Caledonian crows and kea parrots can learn about the usefulness of objects by playing with them - similar to human baby behaviour.

Lychnis

Is scrub jay talk okay here? They're corvids.

A pair of scrub jays lives in my small urban yard. I've been making friends with them by sitting out at the same time each day and giving them peanuts. At first, I had to toss them at least three feet away before they'd swoop down to get them, but now they'll come right up to me. Or, rather, the female will come right up to me. I call her JJ, because that's how I call out to her ("Jay, Jay!"), and I'm just very creative like that. When I talk to JJ, she makes little croaking noises back at me. Meanwhile, her mate (whom I call 'Big Blue,' 'cause he's an unusually big and chonky jay and, like I said, I am very creative) will flutter over to sit on a nearby branch of the cherry tree and watch the proceedings suspiciously.

The last couple of days, JJ has been nowhere to be seen, and I was getting worried about her. But then today, Big Blue came close to me to accept a peanut for the very first time. Usually the jays bury the peanuts, but this time Big Blue cracked it open right there in front of me, gulped down one of the nuts, and took the other one into the overgrown robinia hedge. He did the same thing with a second nut, and then a few minutes later, he emerged with JJ in tow. Big Blue then retreated up to his usual tree branch while JJ came over to croak for a couple more peanuts before she returned to the hedge.

So I guess now I know where their nest is. I wonder if JJ's laid any eggs yet. The internet tells me this is the right time of the year for that to be happening.

Siljmonster

a kea took my stepladder

Taintrunner

post top 10 corvos

Atrocious Joe

I had a hawk (I think a Cooper's Hawk) by my house for the first part of this winter

I guess the local crows didn't like it, because they started hanging around for the first time in years and chasing it off

Haven't seen the hawk in months, but the crows are a common sight and sound now

Cowpocalypse

Dr. Corvus D. Clemmons

Soup du Jour

in the fall, there's an absolutely massive murder of crows that hangs out around the mississippi gorge in minneapolis around franklin ave. super surreal biking to work past the children's hospital and seeing hundreds of crows going nuts

they are cool as hell

sullat

Yeah all the crows like to roost downtown and then commute to the neighborhoods during the day. See hundreds, if not thousands circling downtown when I get there about 700. We have a bunch that live by our house, they like to pick and choose the best bits of our compost heap.

TheLemonOfIchabod

beautiful birds, omens of death and dying empires

smarxist

Homeles Friend

i was walking to work when I heard a crow, I looked up at it only to look directly into the sun. It was sitting perfectly below it.

A4R8

Corvids and can't spread Covid, right?

I ask because crows spread the t-virus in Resident Evil: Extinction by feasting on infected corpses. Are we looking at a similar scenario, op?

paul_soccer12

Bill Corvid sounds like a guys name

138

corvids are the best

Zvahl

The Beautiful Jay from the Andes is one of the sleekest and most compelling even if it is antisocial but its abysmal SEO means it will never be as popular as it should

pnumoman

You should do some consulting for them, improve their marketing, maybe workshop a new name or something to give them a boost.

twoday

Lots of magpies around here, and there is an old legend/poem/myth that the number of them you see can be used to predict the future

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret,
Never to be told.
Eight for a wish,
Nine for a kiss,
Ten a surprise you should be careful not to miss,
Eleven for health,
Twelve for wealth,
Thirteen beware it's the devil himself.

Apoplexy

This is a 100% sincere and serious post: My family/household has a pod of crows that're extremely friendly to us. They even know who's who in the family based on what we do for them. We put food out for them, a lotta stuff like chicken, turkey, ham carvasses end up out back and they come pick them clean/carry off the bones. Our neighbors keep wondering why their gutters get clogged with chicken bones, but I think we're keeping mum. They come up onto our deck to peer in at the crack of dawn to see when someone wakes up so they can crow at us as if to say 'hey, more food!' or 'thanks!' after they're fed. They perch up on our roof when nobody's around and wait for someone to come home, at least if it's one of my parents who put the food out. They don't seem to care about my comings and goings, haha. They used to keep hawks away from the place when hawks would hang around and kill/feed on mourning doves, little birds, and even ducks (our area of MN used to have heated ponds that didn't ever freeze over, so mallards just stayed all fucking year in flocks numbering into the 100s, we could go through a 50-pound bag of cracked corn in a day with them around). Oh, and they do the 'shiny objects' shit all the time with us. They'll drop off shit on our front porch or onto our deck, keys and the like. It's fucking insane.

They're just genuinely really cool and smart birds.

Peanut President

I get blue jays in my yard eating the birdfood I put out for them. It's amazing how quickly they figure out a hierarchy. I got a little statue of a lady holding a bowl that I put the food in and the birds organize as such:
Biggest Grackle sits in the bowl throwing food on the ground and eating the corn
Smaller Grackles eat the food on the ground that they want
Blue Jays hang around the periphery dashing in to grab a bite then dashing back out
Finches just bounce around eating the small seeds no one wants
Mourning Doves sit on the ground 10 feet away waiting for the commotion to end and picking up the scraps later

birds rule

Empire State

Actually it's pronounced "crow-vid," you moron, you absol

Jon Joe

Here's a crow vid

Lychnis

Here are some scrub jays displaying their color memory by playing the shell game

And here is a raven named Fable, solving puzzles and showing off how much smarter she is than scrub jays

Barnum Brown Shoes

I really miss the ravens in fairbanks. They were my friends.

CODChimera

Couple of fantails saying hello earlier. They are so friendly and one looked mostly black which I'd never seen before

dex_sda

crows are super fucking cool

TrixRabbi

Finally a thread about Crows!

Eat This Glob

i had to go to paris for work last summer. I stayed in a cheap motel out by de gualle, but it had a courtyard in the middle with a couple big trees. in the biggest of the trees sat some black and white corvids, magpies probably. i had never been to europe before so im just guessing.

anyway, none of them were smoking, best I could tell. they were very french and snobbish and they refused to speak to me because i could only say a few courtesy words in their mother tongue. pricks - i knew damn well they spoke english. i can only imagine what they had to say about the fat american when j went back to my room

My grandmother has a semi-wild pet crow that would follow her to school when she was a kid. The dream, basically.

DoubleDonut

Here's a cool article about crows recognizing human faces and telling each other about dangerous humans

T-man

FUN FACT! My last name is Crowe, or, as I have called it on every forum, "crow but with an e". I have no idea why that name, because my family never fucking gets it's story straight. I really like my last name, and I think crows are cool even if I know very little about them.

Unsinkabear

I live in Florida and was fucking green with envy about how many people itt seem to be just chilling with scrub jays and thinking nothing of it when they're so rare... turns out there is more than one type of scrub jay, and only ours are a conservation concern! Still jealous, but it's a good thing there are some subtypes of the little guys out there who are doing okay.

Lychnis

Aw, yeah. Ours are Western or California scrub jays (they keep changing the name), and they're doing fine. The ones out here seem to adapt very well to urban and suburban living. They're common backyard birds here in Portland.

They're so common, in fact, that lots of people don't like them: like all corvids, they can be aggressive and apparently sometimes bully smaller birds at feeders. I never see any jays bothering the flocks of goldfinches I also feed, though - as soon as they figured out they're too big for the finch feeders, they started just completely ignoring them.

Poniard

Hilario Baldness

Outside of my workplace is the site of an eternal battle between families of crows and red tailed hawks. It happens literally every Summer since I've been there.

Baby crows, born into a war they didn't ask for.

Lychnis

In Yachats, the war is between the crows and the seagulls. They occupy opposite banks of the estuary: big patches of white covering the wet sand on one side of the water, big patches of black covering the sand on the other.

Unsinkabear

Both of these sound metal as fuck. No bird wars where I am, sadly. I grew up in a neighborhood with lots of crow activity, but where I live there are only blue jays, wading birds, vultures (so many doom birds! My old apartment had a group of them that would roost on the roof across from us and just watch us come and go), and ospreys... so many ospreys, it's awesome. But I haven't seen a crow or a red-tailed hawk in ages, and now that I think about it that's pretty weird for Florida. Are ospreys aggressive towards them? I've never seen one even notice another bird, they just hunt their fish and make their weird little high-pitched noises. Maybe the crows just don't fuck with coastline?

T-man

Were war corvids deployed in the coup? Do we have any on the scene reporters?

Saint_Rukus

crows are cool and i miss being able to pet Eddie (i call him sir edward the second cause hes second eddie) at the nature center

hopefully he's doing fine and the vets there are still giving him pets

Miles Vorkosigan

Been walking along the train tracks lately and noticed a raven couple collecting grasses for a nest on top of an electric pylon. Maybe we'll get to see some baby ravens soon

Mr. Lobe

When I lived in Seattle, I worked at a lab at UW that was about a 15 minute walk away from my apartment. At some point during my 3 year stay in that city I started feeding crows peanuts in the shell, and while they were reluctant at first, 5 or so months of patient entreaty earned me a the attention a group of birds that began to number in the dozens every time I left my home or the lab where I worked during daylight hours. Instead of merely collecting the peanuts that I had dropped in their presence after I cleared enough distance between them and myself, they began to actively follow me when I stepped outdoors and into their territory, sometimes even snatching from midair the nuts I tossed for them.

As endearing as I found them, in time I had to start walking through backstreets, alleys, and other unusual paths in order to avoid intimidating people with the mob of crows that followed me so closely. They would sometimes even menace people who crossed my path, swooping down at them to drive them away. And though I enjoyed the company of these scoundrels, I must have spent 40 dollars in peanuts on them every month to make sure I was never in short supply. I have never been much for pet ownership, but this particular relationship with animals suited me well. I never had to clean up after them, and on the occasions that I had to leave the city, I could be confident they could take care of themselves without me.

While I question whether they ever truly held for me any fondness in their little hearts or if they just saw me as a peculiar food dispenser, among them were particularly bold specimens who, on rare occasion, would land on shoulder-height walls and ledges, and permit me to extend out an offering which at times they would take directly from my hand. To know those particular birds had such trust for me felt like an accomplishment, like a communion with a wild intelligence that saw fit to abide my company, even if on mercenary terms.

Poor Outlook

What you feel for crows, I feel for getting people to hang out with me. Cool short story

Rah!

Dustcat

Jon Joe

There's been a murder!

Rah!

people are rantin and raven about this thread many say sir mr jon joe sir this is a top flight operation

Rauros

whisky jacks are where it's at, but their days are numbered with climate change.

Mr. Lobe

The critically endangered Alala is very smart

It also has a really funny call

Yet another victim of colonialism...

bollig

Crows are dope. I've been living in this city for like 8 years now and the crow population has absolutely exploded. My theory is that more people are letting their cats out, thus eating smaller birds, thus creating less competition for the same resources. It's quite astounding how many there are and I love it.

Anyway, I would love to have the crows on my side, so I guess the thing to do would be to just go for a walk and feed them every day. Is there preferred food peanuts? Unshelled?

Mr. Lobe

peanuts in the shell are recommended by Marzluff, a UW corvid specialist

unsalted is preferable

bolllig

is this because other birds are too fucking stupid/weak to get through the shell, thus the crows get them?

Squizzle

it could be even simpler than that: maybe they told one another it is a nice place to live, as a crow. that happens. not joking. sometimes crow populations will grow because word gets out that a place is nice and crows will move in

Sharkie

i wish i was a corvid

pros:
i would be smart
i could eat roadkill without being JUDGED by HATERS

cons
None

dex_sda

Also no haters to tell me black clothing is 'just a phase'

My first personal encounter with the crows of Seattle began some time in the middle months of spring a handful of years ago, early in May or late in April. I had just moved to the part of University District to the west of UW, and was soon to begin work on the projects that drew me to that city in the first place. Taking advantage of the free time I had until then, I began scouting the area surrounding my new home. One day I wandered across a bridge which passed over the narrow section of lake that separates university territory in the north from the more urban portions of the city to the south. In the residential buffer between those two districts, I came across a crow laying low in the section of grass between the sidewalk and the street. Its eyes were bright and it seemed to be attentive to its environment, but it made no effort to move away from me as I approached it. Knowing little of the ways of crows and concerned that it might be injured, I came closer to see if there was anything visibly wrong with it.

What I did not realize at that time was that this was fledgling season, and it is fairly common for the juvenile crows that make their first attempts at flight to become unnested. When they are vulnerable on the ground, they are watched closely by elder members of their clans who, as I would quickly discover, call an alert when potential threats approach. Understandably, the hulking primate hunched over to inspect their young in a curious stupor most definitely qualified as a cause for alarm. So as I observed the bird for obvious signs of injury, from the branches of surrounding trees, one calling crow became two, and two became a chorus of tens. The mass of birds that now occupied the branches above were alternating between shouting me down, committing my face to their memory, and diving down at my head. Recognizing that there was nothing to accomplish in that situation, I briskly walked back across the bridge I came from, only stopping to look back at the unnested child, whose calm demeanor betrayed no concern as its elders carried on their assault on me.

For some time after that incident, certain crows would cry an alarm when they saw me, which meant I would need to leave the area quickly if I did not want to be attacked. The story of my efforts to gain their trust was in part an attempt to make amends to these birds that had built such a strong grudge against me. As that story indicates, despite my turbulent introduction to these crows, in the fullness of time they would soon become quite attached to me, though I will never know if my sentimentality for them was in any way reciprocated. It did not need to be, I do not love them because I expect them to love me back. I love them because they are marvelous, spiteful, brilliant creatures into which I easily project so much of myself.

Though I am not in the habit of telling stories with morals, I advise any readers to consider the following warnings:

1. If you see an unnested fledgling, avoid it. Cross the street, choose another route if you must, but do not approach. It is being watched, and your assistance is not wanted.

2. If you do something to earn the anger of crows, do not turn your face to them. For instance, do not, in stupid sentimentality, attempt to appeal your case to them in human words! All you will accomplish is giving them visual data for future hostile encounters.

3. Even a crow may forgive its enemies. But forgiveness not come easily, and demands commitment and consistent sacrifice.

These are difficult times, and I do not know what the future holds for me, or anyone I hold dear in that city. But I know the crows will be alright. I hope I get to see them again one day.

Siljmonster

I say hello to every crow

Rah!

also ravens.

i want the corvids to know im friendly and safe to keep as a circus freak after they take over the earth

cool dance moves

I thought grackles were corvids but it turns out they're not which makes me kinda sad because corvids rule but I like grackles too

Mister Speaker

Dan Aykroyd is a member of the corvid family, widely considered to be the smartest of birds.

Zahl

Crowse Pointe Blank

What a buncha bird-brains (not actually an insult if you read the damn thread)! If you want to join the SA goons as they figure out how to get dead squirrels out of plastic shapes and other genius-level activities, join our murderous gang now!