The weather changed and it feels like fall today in Pittsburgh. The warblers have left, the sparrows are migrating, and none of the birds are singing.
On the other side of the world it’s spring and time to sing.
In the video above a male Australian magpie sings his very best imitations, a quiet serenade in a back garden.
Can you recognize the sounds he’s imitating? Listen for dog barks and budgie sounds.
Quite a virtuoso.
(video by candykim22 from YouTube)
21 January 2013
If you love huge bird events you’re going to love what Sharon Leadbitter saw last Saturday evening.
Sharon went to the Strip District and filmed the crows coming into the roost.
Thousands upon thousands gathered in the trees on the hill from Bigelow Blvd down to the Busway. As night approached they began to do The Wave, just like a crowd in a football stadium.
And they cheered as they rose from their seats. (Turn up your speakers!)
Check out time code 0:59 to 1:15.
Wow!
(video by Sharon Leadbitter)
p.s. Sharon adds, “If anyone wants to join me sometime, the crows start showing up at about 4:55pm and keep coming until around 6:30 or so.”
Just like the fighting gulls in Monday’s post, ravens will steal food but they have other ideas on how to go about it.
Watch this video from PBS NATURE’s Ravens. You’ll be amazed.
(video on YouTube by PBS NATURE)
(p.s. The show is not this “Sunday at 8/7” but it’s available online. Click on the Ravens link above to watch the full episode.)
It was cold and very snowy on Saturday when more than 80 people braved the weather to count birds for the Pittsburgh Christmas Bird Count. We learned the preliminary results last night at the annual CBC Dinner.
Like all counts, Pittsburgh’s circle has a diverse landscape within its 15 mile diameter. Over the years the circle has seen a lot of residential and commercial development but something made this year special. Even though all the data wasn’t in yet, we tallied 76 species including tundra swans, common goldeneyes, ravens, red-breasted nuthatches, white-winged crossbills, pine siskins and a short-eared owl (an unusual owl for the Pittsburgh circle).
For sheer numbers, though, the crows won hands down. Sue Solomon, Claire Staples, Joellen Popma and Jana Oster stationed themselves near the Strip District roost before sunset and counted crows until it was too dark to see. By then they’d counted more than 18,000 and more were still flying in. Added to those seen in the rest of the city, the total number of crows counted in the City of Pittsburgh on December 29 was 20,058. And that doesn’t include crows in other parts of the circle!
To get an idea of what the counters saw last Saturday, here’s a video from Sharon Leadbitter taken in the Strip District exactly two years ago today. Yes, the crows have been coming here for years.
Robins or starlings might outnumber crows in the city right now, but who wants to count them? We’re busy counting crows! 😉
(photo by Sharon Leadbitter of crows flying when it’s almost too dark to see; video by Sharon Leadbitter)
When five rooks came to celebrate my blog’s anniversary last week they piqued my interest because we never see them in North America.
Rooks are Eurasian relatives of crows, found from Ireland to Japan. At a distance they look like American crows with very long beaks but this is an illusion. Their beaks look long because the skin on their faces is naked and matches the beak color.
Close up the skin is obvious and a bit disturbing if you’re not used to it. When they perch with wings hunched and feathers puffed they resemble the Grim Reaper. Actually, artists probably chose rooks as their model for the Grim Reaper and not the other way around.
Like blue jays, rooks can store food in their throat bags, then carry it elsewhere. The throat becomes distended as you can see briefly in the video above.
Rooks are more social than their American relatives. They nest communally in the treetops in collections called rookeries. In North America we have no rooks but our herons use the same nesting technique so we call their groupings heron rookeries.
Like crows, rooks are curious and really smart but this can make them annoying. To a rook, it’s normal to make holes to hide food but this is a liability if you keep one indoors. Fortunately, few people do.
Early this year I enjoyed reading Corvus: A Life With Birds by Esther Woolfson in which she tells the story of her rook named Chicken, a very smart and engaging bird, but I agree with the Daily Mail which said, “Yet perhaps the best measure of Woolfson’s candidacy for sainthood is the permission she has given Chicken to dismantle the plaster and lath on her hallway wall so that the rook has its own food storage space.”
…You see what I mean…?
Smart… but not good pets.
(video by Goldfinch Garden on YouTube)
Look who showed up this morning! It’s a British Invasion and they’re singing their own version of the Beatles Birthday song,
“They say it’s your Bird-thday
We’re gonna have a good time…
Yes we’re going to a party party.
Yes we’re going to a party party.”
Hello, Rooks! Thanks for coming all the way from Britain to celebrate Outside My Window’s 5th birthday. Do you have any requests?
“Yes, we’ve been reading your blog and learning a lot of useful stuff about birds, weather, plants, flowers, and interstellar space. Now we have 5 questions.”
1. What numbers describe Outside My Window?
That’s easy. The blog averages 577 visitors a day and creates 22% of all traffic to WQED.org. (A big THANK YOU to my readers!)
2. Which posts had the most readers in the past year?
Dorothy wins the prize. Top readership goes to Peter Bell’s amazing pictures of Dorothy attacking a bald eagle over Schenley Plaza. Last year’s Falcon or Hawk? continues to win the top prize from Google search.
3. What spawned the most comments?
When National Audubon posted Have You Seen Any Blue Jays Lately? on their Facebook page it generated 63 comments, but the stand-alone prize goes to Mouse In The House with 26. The mouse struck a cord, eh?
4. What were your favorite photos in the past year?
Wow, that’s hard! Here are three: Peter Bell’s Peregrine versus Bald Eagle (of course Dorothy’s always a favorite), Steve Gosser’s Chick at Tarentum and Chuck Tague’s Walking On Air.
5. Which posts were your personal favorites?
Morning Glory clouds and Move-In Day taught me the most, but I have to say that my favorite was the coming home story of Beauty, the peregrine queen of Rochester, New York in Whose Egg Is This???.
“Oooooooo, peregrines!,” say the rooks, “We’re afraid of peregrines!”
Sorry, guys. In compensation I’m letting you eat the entire cake. (Now that they’re standing on it, it’s theirs!)
(party rooks by Joan Guerin)
p.s. Do you have a favorite post? A suggestion for new topics? Leave a comment and let me know.
I predict that the first time most people notice that big flocks of crows are back in town will be during evening rush hour on Monday November 5.
Can you guess why?
(video of the flock in December 2010 by Sharon Leadbitter)
Pittsburgh’s crows are back!
The winter flock is building. Hundreds gathered last evening near Bigelow Boulevard at Craig Street. As sunlight faded in the western sky they left to roost … where?
This morning Tony Bledsoe dodged the “rain” from their roost in the trees near Clapp Hall. His guess at the size of the flock? 500. And this is just the beginning. By November they’ll build to a crescendo of crows.
Where do they gather at dusk? Leave a comment with the news … or tweet me the location of Pittsburgh’s crow flock @KStJBirdblog (hashtag #pghcrows)
(photo of hooded crows in Denmark, by Jens Rost via Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original.)
Last month Pittsburgh’s young peregrines made their first short flight. This month they’ll become self sufficient and ready to leave home.
When they do, they’ll have adventures and most of them will be firsts: the first time they’re alone without family, the first time they see the ocean or the Great Lakes, the first time they encounter birds they never saw at home.
I wonder what they’ll do the first time they meet a raven.
Ravens are slightly larger than peregrines and are acrobatic fliers though not as fast as peregrines. In this video from the raven’s perspective, a peregrine and a juvenile raven wheel and joust in the air. You’d think this would be dangerous for the young raven but his parents are unconcerned.
Maybe the peregrine and raven are testing their flight skills. Maybe the peregrine is a juvenile too. Maybe that’s why they’re playing.
(video by Rick Boufford at The Raven Diaries, www.theravendiaries.com)
4 June 2012
It used to be easy to identify crows in Pittsburgh. Every crow was an American crow (Corvus brachyrhyncos). But not any more.
In recent years fish crows (Corvus ossifragus) have been expanding their range northward from the coastal Southeast. The first I’d heard of them in western Pennsylvania was in Indiana County, PA in 2008. I found this odd because Indiana County is land-locked.
What was a fish crow doing without fish? They earned their name by scavenging on beaches but fish crows aren’t picky. They’ll eat anything. They must have made an easy transition from dead fish to discarded hamburgers. Perhaps one spring they followed some American crows to western Pennsylvania … and so they are here. This year, 2012, they’ve been reported nesting in the City of Pittsburgh.
Fish crows are smaller than American crows but they’re impossible to tell apart except by voice. As Birds of North America Online says, “The only reliable difference between the two is vocal. The Fish Crow sounds like an American Crow with a bad cold.”
I’m sure you can imagine an American crow’s call without listening but here’s a recording to prepare you for the difference. “Caw, Caw, Caw.”
The fish crow’s call is two nasal syllables: “Uh-oh. Uh-oh.” (Click here to hear.)
Easy? Yes, except at this time of year. Baby American crows have nasal voices too (yikes!) so the call you hear could be a baby crow. There’s still a difference, though. Baby American crows call with a single note. (Click hear to hear.)
So, now that we have two kinds of crows, you’ll have to wait until they speak to be sure of them. “Uh oh!”
(photo of a fish crow by Chuck Tague)