crows – Treehouse Writers

A sketch of a crow sitting in the sun on the street. I took up drawing this year. I’m still very much a beginner, but I am getting much better at really looking at something and seeing it at the level necessary to draw it.

One of the things I do is take pictures of things I think would be interesting to draw, so the sketch accompanying this post was made from a photo I took of a crow standing in the street on a sunny day.

My sweetheart and I feed the neighborhood crows, so I’m always looking at them. And, as with drawing, I find that the more I look, the more details I discover.

Years back my sweetheart started carrying some cat kibble in a small pouch so he could try to make friends with the crows. However, this was a hit-or-miss system and it didn’t really take off until during the pandemic, when he joined me on my regular walks around the block. The crows took note of us because the pattern was more regular.

After awhile, I had to start carrying treats, too, because they associated me with my sweetheart. They come to our bedroom window most mornings. We now feed crows within a four-or-five-block radius of our place.

Today, though, when we went for a short walk, none of our crows were nearby. However, there were large numbers of them in the sky, all flying the same general direction.

I’m pretty sure there’s a big crow meet-up somewhere downtown. I know crows have meetings from time to time. Sometimes they have them in a big tree in our neighborhood, but whatever they were doing today involved more crows than that.

Crow business. I’d really like to know more about crow business, but I don’t speak Crow, more’s the pity. Continue reading “Learning to Look at Nature”…

crows Shortly after dawn most mornings, a crow calls loudly, “Caw, caw, caw, caw.” It seems to be speaking to the whole neighborhood of crows, though I’m not sure how large an area this announcement covers. I refer to this as the “Call to Prayer,” because it reminds me of the calls used by mosques, but I don’t know its true purpose.

Shortly after the call, crows come by our window box, collect the cat kibble we put out the night before, and have a drink in the pan we’ve put out for that purpose. The actual time this happens varies depending on what time the sun comes up. It can be a bit later on days when the marine layer is strong, but the crows will be out and about even on overcast days.

Except when they’re sitting on eggs and raising fledglings, the crows don’t sleep in our neighborhood. Every evening, not long before sunset, they start flying to their roost. I am told by others that one big roosting place is along the Berkeley shoreline. I suspect there are a number; there are a lot of crows in the East Bay.

They do build nests in our neighborhood, but we have never been sure exactly where their nests are. They are very good at concealing them in the larger trees somewhere.

Crows are obviously quite social. They hang out in family groups, some of them clearly the young from earlier in the year or a year or two before. However, each small family group has territory within the neighborhood, and they seem to be careful not to invade each other’s areas.

They can tell people apart, which puts them one up on us, because we cannot tell crows apart by appearance. We know one group because of where we see them regularly and because they have almost no fear of us. When we toss kibble for them, they will fly right down. Others, who also live nearby, wait until we’ve moved on to collect the goodies. Continue reading “What I’ve Learned From Crows”…