Four years ago in Seattle, eight year old Gabi Mann consistently fed and interacted with the crows in her backyard. She formed such a tight bond that she could recognize individual crows by sight and gave them names. The crows rewarded her by bringing gifts.

Many animals give gifts to members of their own species but crows and other corvids are the only ones known to give gifts to humans. As John Marzluff explains in the video, crows will do this for people who feed them a lot and pay attention to them, or even rescue them.

When I read about this several years ago in Marzluff’s book Gifts of the Crow, I briefly thought about trying to make friends with crows but decided it would be a difficult relationship. If your friendship with crows is based on food they remember your generosity and bring their friends. Lots of friends. They can be quite demanding and don’t understand if you stop. Not everyone appreciates this.

Gabi’s story made international news in February 2015 but we don’t hear about it anymore. Six months after this video was filmed two of Gabi’s neighbors sued, demanding $200,000 and a court order prohibiting the Mann family from putting out more than a 1/4 pound of bird food. It took a year to settle the lawsuit; the details were not made public.

Crows remember the faces of those who are mean to them and those who are especially kind. I’m sure that a few special crows remember Gabi.

(video from BBC on YouTube)

Unimpressed by the University of Pittsburgh’s scarecrow recordings, Pittsburgh’s winter crow flock continues to roost on campus. On Saturday evening, 29 December 2018, Claire Staples and I counted them for the Christmas Bird Count. It was harder than it sounds.

We began at 4pm at the highest vantage point we could find — the top deck of a parking garage between Trees Hall and the Petersen Events Center. From there we could see two huge streams of crows arriving from the south and east, pouring into the trees near Kennard Playground. Unfortunately the playground is over the edge of the hill so those crows went out of sight as soon as they landed.

By 5pm there were so many crows that new arrivals were landing on Trees Hall roof. We were pretty confident we’d counted 10,000 … and then they began to leave. What?!

The crows were headed for Schenley Heights so we followed in the car. We thought they might roost in the Heights but they were restless and on the move. Those in the air were headed for the Cathedral of Learning. We chased them down the hill.

Sure enough, Tennyson Avenue between Alumni and Clapp Halls was “Crow Central.” It was impossible to count them in the air as you can see in Claire’s video.

But I had another way to count them. Since 2016 I’ve tallied Crows-per-tree and Trees-with-crows to get an estimate of the Pitt roost. By car we tallied 45 trees with crows. With an average of 230 crows per tree that’s 10,350 crows at Pitt. Close enough. 10,000.

We think this is only half the crows in Pittsburgh. Claire and I saw just two of the four streams of crows that head to town at dusk from the north, south, east and west.

Where do the crows from the north and west spend the night? Are there 10,000 of them, too? We didn’t have time to chase them.

A clue concerning the origin of the Pitt crow roost

On Saturday Claire and I reminisced about the 2012 CBC when she and three other women counted 20,000 crows from a vantage point in the Strip District. That year a large part of the roost used trees at the closed housing project, Addison Terrace, that was downhill from Kennard Playground. In the spring of 2013 Addison Terrace was demolished and redeveloped into new homes. The first time Pitt had real trouble with crows was in the fall of 2013 when Addison Terrace was no longer available as a roost. Hmmmm!

(video by Claire Staples, 29 Dec 2018)

In 2015 the International Coastal Research Center in Otsuhi, Japan figured out how to keep crows from pillaging their headquarters building.  With the advice of a crow expert they posted “Crows Do Not Enter” signs and the crows stayed away!  Here’s how it happened.

On 11 March 2011 the town where ICRC is located, Otsuchi, Japan, was devastated by nearly 30 foot waves from the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. The photo below of the Kirikiri section shows how Otsuchi was wiped out.

The International Coastal Research Center headquarters was severed damaged as well (the three-story building in the photo below).

The first two floors were wrecked, as seen in two photos from the ICRC website.  (Click here to see more photos of the damage.)

However, by 2015 the local jungle crows (Corvus macrorhynchos) could not resist stealing the damaged materials inside the building.  During the nesting season they flew into the open building, ripped insulation off the pipes and carried it to their nests.  

To get rid of the crows the ICRC asked for help from Tsutomu Takeda, an environmental scientist and crow expert.  Rather than using scarecrow tactics he hung large signs on the pipes, visible from outdoors, that said “Crows Do Not Enter.”  

As soon as the signs went up the crows stayed away. This method was still working two years later when Mother Nature Network published the news.

Can the crows read the signs? No, but people can and when they do they look up to see if crows are in the building.  The crows hate it when people watch them stealing nesting material so they stopped doing it.

If the signs worked on jungle crows in Japan, perhaps they’ll work on American crows, too.  I wonder if our winter crow flock would stop roosting at the University of Pittsburgh if they put “Crows Do Not Enter” signs in the trees.  😉

(This post was inspired by MNN: Wild Crows seem to obey Do Not Enter signs, and a report from the ICRC which is no longer online.  Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, the ICRC Recovery Project website and the now-missing ICRC article. I encourage you to click on the captions to see the originals.)