By Alex Ciarfalia
As the coming winter months arrive, you may notice more and more crows flying around: perching themselves on the telephone wires behind your house, roosting together in the trees, gathering in the tens, even hundreds! Why is this? Are we at the beginning of the crowpacolypse? Not quite.
In the winter, crows will roost together, which provides warmth and protection from predators. Winter roosts of crows can consist of those from the local area or from as far up as Canada. After winter passes, the crows will go back up to Canada to nest and continue the crow lineage. You might also see groups of crows, called murders, flying around. Follow these groups for long enough and they’ll lead you right to a giant group of them. This gathering occurs at the end of the day, when the birds are ready to rest and settle down. They will gather in giant groups, sometimes at college campuses or parks. They use this time to rest and “talk” about their day to other crows.
You might wonder to yourself, why only crows? Why don’t you see huge gatherings of sparrows or finches? It comes down to a simple difference in sociability. Crows are very social birds and have a multitude of calls that can mean a multitude of things in different situations. Crows, and practically all corvids, are also tied with parrots for the smartest birds. The part of the brain that corvids use for social interactions is very developed and can even be compared to a primate’s brain.
Crows are very intelligent, and in some cases, are even described to be as smart as a seven year old. They have a particular ingenuity for problem solving. Say that you put a crow and a dog in separate but identical rooms. On one side of the rooms, a large glass room displays the animals’ preferred treat, and the only way to get in is to open a gate with a latch on it. Both the crow and the dog have observed a human open the gate, but the difference is in what they do. The dog might paw at the latch, not understanding how to open it, but only that somehow it does open the gate. However, because the crow is more intelligent, it observed how the human opens the gate through social learning and would try and mimic that, instead of just brute forcing its way in.
So no, it’s not the “crowpocalypse”—it’s just one of nature’s most highly intelligent, social network at work. What may look like chaos in the sky is actually cooperation, communication, and problem-solving unfolding in real time.
