Back in 2015 I blogged about a Corvid called a red-billed chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) using the title Crows with Red Beaks? The chough (pronounced “chuff“) occurs on mountains and coastal cliffs from the west coasts of Ireland and Britain to southern Europe, North Africa, Central Asia, India and China. It is often found in the Himalayas but never seen in North, South, or Central America.
However, in the past seven years, 41 North American readers have commented that they have seen a chough in their neighborhood. Sometimes I reply with the unlikeliness of the sighting and in June 2018 I updated the article with suggestions on what they might have seen instead.
A wild chough in the Americas is such rare bird sighting that it would have made international birding news, like the sighting of a Steller’s sea eagle in Maine. Even so the chough sighting comments keep coming in, including two just last month. Still no news though.
Read the original posting and comments at the link below. What do you think they’ve seen? I’m stumped.
We humans used to think we were very special and very smart because we had language while other species did not. When we learned that other animals had language too our hubris diminished slightly but we still believed in our uniqueness: We were the only species that could think recursively.
In The Recursive Mind (Princeton University Press, 2011) Michael C. Corballis describes “a groundbreaking theory of what makes the human mind unique.”
The Recursive Mind challenges the commonly held notion that language is what makes us uniquely human. In this compelling book, Michael Corballis argues that what distinguishes us in the animal kingdom is our capacity for recursion: the ability to embed our thoughts within other thoughts. “I think, therefore I am,” is an example of recursive thought, because the thinker has inserted himself into his thought. Recursion enables us to conceive of our own minds and the minds of others. It also gives us the power of mental “time travel”—the ability to insert past experiences, or imagined future ones, into present consciousness.
For instance, my sentences are often recursive. If you put parentheses around the complete embedded thoughts they can be thrown away without hurting the sentence. As in: “Our uniqueness suffered another blow last month when a study (published in Science Advances) revealed that crows can think recursively, too.”
The brackets make my head hurt. It’s easier to see in this diagram.
If you put brackets around the starting and ending “thoughts” you’ll see a pattern. The brackets fail in the non-recursive example.
According to Scientific American, after the crows were trained to peck bracket pairs, the researchers tested the birds’ ability to spontaneously generate recursive sequences on a new set of symbols. The birds were successful about 40 percent of the time, on par with 3 to 4 year olds in a 2020 study. The crows were better than monkeys who needed extra training to reach that level.
So another unique human trait is toppled by Corvids.
Crows gathering at dusk in Schenley Park, 21 Jan 2017 (photo by Mike Fialkovich)
5 December 2022
For the past several years I’ve counted Pittsburgh’s winter crow flock for the Christmas Bird Count. Some years I’ve counted as many as 20,000 but last year was a bust. Steady rain, fog, and the fact that the crows moved their roost just before the CBC meant I counted only 220. Aaarrg!
I will not be foiled again this year but I need your help. Where are the crows settling for the night? If you know where they are overnight or after sunset, leave a comment to let me know.
I say “overnight or after sunset” because crows make a big noisy deal out of gathering in large numbers on their way to the roost. Hundreds stage at the tops of trees and shout as more come in. When the sky darkens, they fall silent and leave. For where? That’s the question!
Last weekend I tried to find them. By 5:00pm on Saturday 3 December I was sure I’d found the roost by watching from Mt Washington at the Mon Incline (my vantage point is the pink V on the map below). Crows staged in the trees in The Saddle on Sycamore Street, then left for a tree-filled hillside near Kirkpatrick Street below Oak Hill, marked in yellow 12/3/22. I counted about 7,500.
Yesterday I went back to Mt. Washington, confident they’d do the same thing and I was wrong! They didn’t gather in the The Saddle; they didn’t roost at Kirkpatrick. Instead they gathered in the Hill District above Bigelow Boulevard. I could barely count 2,000. As I drove home I saw thousands over Bigelow Boulevard but couldn’t count while driving. Aaarrg! My guess at their location is marked in yellow 12/4/22.
Did they end up near Heinz Lofts along the Allegheny River or on Troy Hill as they did a few years ago? (See orange blocks and question mark.)
This year Claire Staples and I will count crows together for the CBC on 31 December but I fear the crows will foil us again.
Do you know where the crows are overnight or after sunset in Pittsburgh? If so, please leave a comment with your answer. (We will need this info especially during the week after Christmas.)
p.s. This weekend’s location change can probably be attributed to the weather. Strong west wind vs. weak southwest wind.
Sat 3 Dec 5pm: 43 degrees F. West wind gusting over 30 mph. Temperature falling.
Sun 4 Dec 5pm: 36 degrees F. SW wind at 6 mph. No wind chill.
(photo and map credits are in the captions; click on the captions to see the originals)
Raven over Dawson Street near Schenley Park, 23 October 2022, 8:30am (photo by Andrea Lavin Kossis)
26 October 2022
During the summer corvids stay home to raise their families but as soon as the breeding season is over they move around. In autumn large flocks of American crows return to Pittsburgh to join the winter roost while a few common ravens show up, alone or in pairs.
This month the crows and ravens are back in town. Since August their populations have gone through several phases.
Crows flying to the roost, Pittsburgh, 16 Oct 2021 (photo by Kate St. John)
Late August: On 30 August a surprising count of 380 fish crows gathered on rooftops at Fifth & Craig while only 12 American crows were present that evening.
September: By 6 September fish crow numbers dropped from 30 to zero. American crow numbers rose through the hundreds. No ravens.
October so far: On 10 October a high count 620 American crows flew past “the doorknob” water tower at dusk. By late October no crows were counted because they changed their route. However we now see and hear ravens!
The “doorknob” water tower at dusk, Upper Hill, October 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
Ravens in town?
Crows migrate. Adult ravens stay home year round. However, young ravens go wandering until they reach sexual maturity at three years old. From fall through early spring a handful of these ravens visit Pittsburgh.
Last Sunday 23 October Andrea Lavin Kossis saw two ravens on Dawson Street dining on some “delicious roadkill.” The pair even had something to say about it.
Brock! Brock!
p.s. In December I’ll enlist your help to find the crow roost in time for the Pittsburgh Christmas Bird Count.
Sometimes an experiment doesn’t work as planned but the results are far better than expected.
Researchers wanted to track Australian magpies (Gymnorhina tibicen), a very social species that lives in groups of 2-12 individuals on permanent territories. Rather than use the typical long-lasting harness that requires recapturing the bird to collect the datapack, they designed a harness that would release when exposed to a magnet placed at a feeding station. Would the new harness design work? The first step was to try it on a few magpies and see.
Researchers led by Joel Crampton captured five magpies at Pacific Paradise, Queensland, banded them and fitted each one with a GPS harness. Then they followed the birds to see the harness release at the feeding station.
Each banded bird immediately tried to remove the harness but it was too well designed for that to work. Instead the unexpected occurred. Unbanded magpies came to the rescue.
On the day of trapping, one individual was observed attempting to remove its own tracker but was then approached and aided by another juvenile (without a tracker or coloured leg-band) once again pecking the harness part of the tracker. The tracker remained but, within the next 10 minutes, an adult female (also without a tracker or leg-band) proceeded to approach and successfully pecked the harness at various points such that the tracker came off the fitted juvenile within c. 10 minutes. This first Magpie that had been tagged had its GPS device removed within 1 h.
This happened over and over again until none of the banded birds had trackers. Here’s a video of the magpies helping each other.
This finding was unexpected but far better than the original experiment. It was the first time anyone had seen rescue behaviour among Australian magpies.
To our knowledge, this is the first study to report the conspecific removal of GPS trackers, and should be considered when planning future tracking studies especially on highly social species.
Corvids [crows, jays, magpies] occupy virtually every terrestrial habitat on Earth, including Arctic tundra, arid deserts, urban streets, and tropical rainforest. Having likely dispersed around the world over millions of years from an Australasian core, it is odd that they never reached New Zealand or Patagonia or disappeared from them both.
It’s hard to imagine a place without any crows or jays but it is true of the southern end of South America, New Zealand and quite a few Caribbean and Pacific islands. I learned this seven years ago when I visited a place that has none of them: St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands.
In the absence of intelligent omnivorous corvids, other birds fill their niche. The all-purpose crow/jay/predator at St. John is the pearly-eyed thrasher (Margarops fuscatus) …
… an aggressive, opportunistic omnivore that feeds primarily on large insects, but also feeds on fruits and berries, and will occasionally eat lizards, frogs, small crabs and other bird’s eggs and nestlings.
Pittsburgh’s winter crow flock hasn’t been in Oakland and Shadyside for months but they’ve been making a splash on the North Side lately.
On 23 January Cindy Pomorski reported, “I have heard and seen them 2 mornings this week in the trees in the wooded area near the DL Clark building,” on the North Shore near Heinz Field.
That same day crows were photographed on the roof of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette headquarters across the Heinz Field parking lot from DL Clark.
I’ve often noticed that in winter there are more birds in the city than the countryside. Though we may not have “quality” birds we make up for it in quantity with large numbers of fruit-eating birds drawn to our ornamental trees.
In the past two weeks hundreds of American robins have been feasting in Oakland. Some of the fruits were inedible until the deep freeze softened them so the robins circled back to finish the Bradford pears last weekend. This week they started on pyracantha berries and the red fruits of this (hawthorn?) tree next to the Cathedral of Learning.
Was half the fruit wasted when birds and squirrels knocked it out of the trees?
Look closely and you can see that deer walked among the fallen fruit. They must have crossed Forbes or Fifth Avenue after dark to browse on the Cathedral of Learning lawn.
Nearby, the sweetgum balls were coated in snow on Monday, all melted by Wednesday.
American goldfinches arrived to pull seeds out of the balls. Some fell on the snow.
Pittsburgh’s winter crow flock flies past South Oakland on 14 Dec 2020 (photo by Mary DeVaughn)
13 January 2022
Driving home yesterday from northern Pennsylvania I reached the edge of Downtown near the PPG Arena parking lot(*) at 5:35pm. Night was falling but the overcast sky was still lit.
As I drove up the ramp to Bigelow Boulevard three huge flocks of crows burst off the Flag Plaza hilltop (at right below) and swirled overhead to the roof of The Pennsylvanian (left), back and forth.
Trees at dusk and NO CROWS (photo by Kate St. John in 2017)
6 January 2022
Year after year we’ve counted thousands of crows — up to 20,058! — during Pittsburgh’s Christmas Bird Count so we were stunned when the annual count on 1 January 2022 yielded zero (0!) at the South Oakland roost and only seven crows nearby at dusk. Roosting crows were a No Show at the CBC. Where were they? And why?
The best way to count Pittsburgh’s winter crow flock is to find a good vantage point and count them as they stream into the roost. Before Christmas they roosted in South Oakland, confirmed by my count of at least 5,200 crows near Magee Hospital on 8 December. However on Count Day a number of things went wrong.
Crow counters usually work as a team but my teammate Claire Staples was injured in mid-December and is still recuperating. I tried to recruit others but no one jumped at the chance because …
The weather was warm but extremely rainy and foggy. All the high vantage points were enshrouded in fog so I went to Dan Marino Field in South Oakland where the crows fly by. It poured! I was soaked by relentless rain for an hour while I counted five crows overhead and two cawing in the neighborhood. Yet 220 American robins pulled worms from the mud and sang in the rain. As I drove home I checked the roosting trees near Magee Hospital. No crows anywhere!
Apparently crows change their roosting habits in heavy rain.
Were they still flying to South Oakland? As a partial answer I counted from the roof of my building on 2 January for 20 minutes. In the distance 1,140 crows flew toward South Oakland. Less than I expected. Have they split the roost into several locations?
The crows are here somewhere. Have you seen them? Where?
UPDATE: Gerry Devinney filmed a huge flock of crows near the Petersen Events center on 18 December.
On Throw Back Thursday here’s a look back at the Good Old Days of 2012 when it was possible to count 20,000 crows.
