
The Secret Lives of Urban Crows - robteix
https://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2017/5/17/the-secret-life-of-urban-crows
======
Theodores
I highly recommend anyone take the time to study the birds that they see on a
regular basis. All of yesterday I decided to film the birds in slo-mo with my
mobile phone. I wasn't even sure what breed of birds I was filming but today I
was back making another video. This time I knew from yesterday all about the
lovely gulls I now adore and feed instead of the crows. Crows are next because
they are very good at aerobatics too.

Just an idea to film the birds coupled with the stellar results you get from a
mobile (okay not broadcast quality), means that today I count myself as a
budding ornithologist. Today I know that some of 'my gulls' could be 30+ years
old.

So here are my feathered friends from today, eating fresh wholemeal bread I
baked myself:

[https://youtu.be/UmxZr1aihDQ?t=4m](https://youtu.be/UmxZr1aihDQ?t=4m)

I would urge others to use the gadget in their pocket to record and watch back
in slo-mo what the birds do. It is a whole new world.

~~~
psy-q
I'd suggest adding sources of fat or protein to their snacks:
[https://www.thespruce.com/good-bread-for-
birds-385833](https://www.thespruce.com/good-bread-for-birds-385833)

------
oasisbob
I've been in trees when hundreds of crows show up on their way to the roost,
It's a pretty cool experience. This video doesn't quite capture what it really
feels like being up in the canopy when they arrive, but I tried:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/74ongr/sharing_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/74ongr/sharing_a_beacon_hill_tree_with_a_huge_murder_of/)

Barred owls are also fun, they're often really curious, I've never had one
live up to their aggressive reputation. Though, apparently green ropes look
sufficiently like food ... one spent a good ten minutes trying to fly off with
my climb line one time.

------
munificent
I live in Seattle. My wife is an animal lover and started feeding peanuts to
the squirrels in the backyard. We have a Dutch door in the kitchen, and when
she leans out, they will take peanuts out of her hand. It's pretty adorable.
It's adorable and also kind of alarming when they squirrels leap onto the
window frame of the door and stare at me when I'm making coffee in the
morning.

Once you start pumping calories into the backyard, all sorts of stuff shows
up, so we have a lot of crows now too. They have some sort of schedule they
keep, so at specific times of day, there will be about a dozen of them on the
power lines and deck railing, waiting for a handout. The poop is annoying, but
the noise isn't. Crows have a lot of different vocalizations and they sounds
they make when waiting for food tend to be pretty mild.

------
takk309
At one point I was renting a house that had a magpie nest in one tree. I was
able to condition the magpies over time with offerings of food scraps. It was
a lot of fun to have the magpies hangout on the deck railing and make noise
back and forth with me. I got to recognize three of them by their voices. I
miss them...

------
koenigdavidmj
The colored bands they mentioned correspond to the study here:
[http://depts.washington.edu/uwcrows/](http://depts.washington.edu/uwcrows/)

Seattle residents are encouraged, when they see a banded crow, to report its
location and activity to that page.

~~~
logicallee
>Seattle residents are encouraged, when they see a banded crow, to report its
location and activity to that page.

if you think about it, the major difference between these crows and users in
2017 is that the crows don't have to have 15 seconds of their life stolen by a
popup about the researchers' privacy policy that they have to agree to before
they're able to get on with their lives.

------
potta_coffee
Spent some time at Camp Pendleton. We had a pallet of MREs sitting out at the
range. We came back from some training to find numerous boxes of MREs opened,
the contents strewn all over those place. It's amazing to me that crows can
open a heavy-duty cardboard box, pull out MRE packages and open them, and then
get to the individually packed food items inside. These birds are cool.

------
l33tbro
>She tromped through the wet grass in calf-high Sorel snow boots

> At the first sliver of morning light on the eastern horizon, the treetop
> planet croaks to life. This mass of shrieking marauders lifts up and
> atomizes again into x-shaped silhouettes,

Does anyone else find it distracting when journalists attempt to imitate their
literary heroes and write ham-fisted prose like this? I'm all for experimental
journalism, but this really took away from the thrust of the article for me.

~~~
Gibbon1
Personally I call that NPR style and I hate it as much as I hate NPR.

'We're here to talk to this interesting person who knowings interesting things
about X. But first I'l going to drone on about his grandfather who was a
tailor in a quaint Italian neighborhood in Pretoria'

------
himom
Crows are crazy smart. One of em snuck into my mechanic’s garage, stole a
small package of sunflower seeds from _across the other end of the shop_ and
had a sunflower seed party with his buddies in the parking lot.

~~~
coldacid
That goes for pretty much all corvids. Brilliant birds, even if they haven't
much of a singing voice.

~~~
telesilla
Not sure about that! The magpie can be spectacular.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYEYc8Ge3nw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYEYc8Ge3nw)

Edit: Australian Magpie is NOT a corvid, they just share the same name as the
European Magpie because of the look. Oh well.

[http://coyot.es/thecorvidblog/2016/03/07/australian-
magpies-...](http://coyot.es/thecorvidblog/2016/03/07/australian-magpies-are-
not-corvids/)

------
news_to_me
> But the saga reveals the passion and fury crows can elicit

Sounds like it reveals the passion and fury of the classic Seattle NIMBY
homeowner more than anything.

~~~
throwanem
I like crows a lot and I respect them for their canny nature. I don't know how
well I would like having a hundred of them constantly within close earshot.

------
ablekh
I hope that people here will enjoy this amazing video
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbSu2PXOTOc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbSu2PXOTOc))
as much as I did. I knew that crows are smart, but this is clearly the next
level of intelligence ... By the way, I have discovered this video via the
relevant cool project's website:
[http://www.crowdedcities.com](http://www.crowdedcities.com).

------
Rotdhizon
I read this as "The secret lives of urban cows" and was genuinely confused for
the first several paragraphs until I looked at the title again.

------
zaarn
Crows are amazing creatures. And annoying at times.

Our garden used to have lots of crows but because they continued to bully our
dog (they stole and ate his food, sometimes even seconds after we put the bowl
outside) we had to chase them away via various methods so our dog and the
neighbors could have some peace.

------
verkter
Did anybody else read this as "The Secret Lives of Urban Cows"?

~~~
nautilus12
Yes, and I got halfway into the article until I realized it was crows. Even
the crow picture at the top didn't tip me off.

