Brain Birds: Amazing Crows and Ravens
(Page 5 of 5)
December 2006/January 2007
By Terry Krautwurst
Call of the Wild
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Although hanging out together in trees serves crows and ravens well, it makes them unpopular among humans with homes and farms below. After all, admiration doesn’t come easily when the birds are gobbling your seedlings and sliming your deck with waste. Large numbers of crows and ravens can decimate crops and threaten livestock. Until the latter third of the 20th century, farmers and ranchers poisoned, trapped and shot the “pests” by the thousands, nearly wiping out raven populations in the East. Today, crows and ravens are protected by federal and state hunting regulations and by a wider awareness of the birds’ benefits as major controllers of agricultural pest insects. Crows remain plentiful, and ravens are making a comeback. Both species are extending their ranges into food-rich urban areas.
Crows and ravens are neighbors worth watching, carefully — not for the faults we perceive in them, but for their extraordinary lives as intelligent, complex social creatures. So don’t overlook them the next time you’re outdoors. Grace and beauty ride on the wings of a raven soaring in the sky. And that familiar crow’s caw? There’s poetic sustenance in it, too, as Thoreau observed when he wrote in his journal in the winter of 1855:
“I hear faintly the cawing of a crow far, far away, echoing from some unseen wood-side ... It mingles with the slight murmur of the village, the sound of children at play, as one stream empties gently into another, and the wild and tame are one. What a delicious sound! It is not merely crow calling to crow, for it speaks to me too. I am part of one great creature with him.”
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