Crows swirling above and landing on the old County Jail, Downtown Pittsburgh, 13 January 2026 (photo by Carol Steytler)
18 January 2026
If you’ve noticed that Pittsburgh’s winter crows are no longer roosting at the Univ. of Pittsburgh in Oakland you might be wondering where they went. Though it’s hard to hide more than 18,000 crows and impossible not to notice the gooey mess they leave behind, it took a while to find out. So where are they?
Crow Patrol member Carol Steytler saw the crows bypass Oakland in early January so she spent several evenings tracking them down.
On 13 January she hit the jackpot! The crows were Downtown, swirling and roosting at the old County Jail.
Thousands of crows overhead, Downtown Pittsburgh (photo by Carol Steytler)
Crows swirling above the old County Jail, Pittsburgh, 13 January 2026 (photo by Carol Steytler)
on the roof
In trees near the old jail, Pittsburgh, 13 Jan 2026 (photo by Carol Steytler)
uh oh. They left a mess, Pittsburgh, 13 Jan 2026 (photo by Carol Steytler)
Carol captured video of their activity on the night of the 17th. Snow swirled with the crows as they settled in at the jail and nearby buildings and trees.
The crows are Downtown. They went to jail.
videos by Carol Steytler, Downtown Pittsburgh 17 January 2026
Wild turkeys displaying in an Allegheny County backyard in 2023 (photo by Kathy Saunders)
13 January 2026
Because wild turkeys are hunted in Pennsylvania their population is well studied by the PA Game Commission. Over the years, studies revealed that the population peaked statewide about 25 years ago then declined for a long time and now stabilized at the lower level. To parse out why, PGC added GPS tracking to their annual wild turkey surveys in four Wildlife Management Units starting in 2022. This makes the annual Winter Turkey Sighting Survey a lot more interesting for us in western PA
During the Winter Pennsylvania Wild Turkey Sighting Survey, 31 December through 15 March 2026, PGC asks the public to help find turkey flocks to trap and release on site for their ongoing turkey studies.
Of particular interest to us in southwestern Pennsylvania is this: The Game Commission will attach GPS transmitters to a sample of turkeys in WMUs 2D, 3D, 4D and 5C (circled below), approximately 150 hens and 100 males in total.
WMU 2D is in our region. For detailed boundaries see PGCs ArcGIS map.
The study started with 199 tracked hens of which 193 nested (6 probably died). About 69% of the 2024 nests failed (no eggs; no hatched). From the successful nests 113 poults survived at least four weeks.
It’s clear from this table that — even in a small statewide sample — our turkey population cannot sustain itself in just one breeding season. Turkey hens must participate in multiple breeding seasons to keep the population stable.
Black-capped chickadee coming in for a landing, 2025, Cape Cod, MA (photo by Bob Kroeger)
11 January 2026
We could watch backyard birds all day, but when they land it happens so fast we don’t see the steps from head-first flight to feet-first landing. How do they do it?
In March 2025 Bob Kroeger captured stop-action stills of birds approaching his Cape Cod feeder. All the birds use similar steps on the way to landing. Black-capped chickadees are very fast. Larger birds take a little more time.
Here are Bob’s three shots of a female northern flicker coming in to land.
Change body angle to upright position with feet out front.
Use wings to put on the brakes.
Feet first, ready to grab! At this point birds stop looking at the perch.
Yesterday Cornell Lab of Ornithology posted super slow motion video of this very thing. Filmed in Massachusetts, watch these birds as they land: black-capped chickadee, tufted titmouse, blue jay, mourning dove, northern cardinal.
Now that it’s really cold — 10°F this morning — Pittsburgh’s winter crow flock roosts in the warmest areas of city street trees and building roofs. The “poot” they leave behind is so unpleasant that people brainstorm about ways to scare crows.
Evidence that crows roosted in the trees above this sidewalk, 7 Nov 2020 (photo by Kate St. John)
In the city it’s not as simple as putting up a scarecrow. This one is scary to humans!
Wooden “clappers” used to be effective at moving the crows away from Univ of Pittsburgh campus, but the crows are bored by them now.
Clappers used to disperse crows in 2020 (photo courtesy Alex Toner, Univ of Pittsburgh)
In 2023 Pitt played a scarecrow recording in the trees near the Cathedral of Learning. Alas it doesn’t work as well now. See a video of the recording here at Trying to Move the Crows.
In 2015 in Japan people put up signs on a building saying “Crows Do Not Enter.” It worked because people read the signs and stared into the building looking for crows. Crows hate to be watched that intently. See Crows Do Not Enter! for more details.
What are crows always afraid of? Great horned owls! The owls are large and powerful, fly silently in the dark, and will eat crows.
Great horned owl (Bubo virginianus) at Frick Park, 20 April 2019 (photo by Steve Gosser)
The great horned owl pair that nested under the Panther Hollow Bridge last winter is hooting and courting now. My friend Andrea B heard one making low pitched hoots from a roof on Parkview Avenue and the other responding in a higher pitch from Schenley Park’s Junction Hollow. (The low pitch is the female because she’s larger. The higher pitch is the male.)
Crows in the know don’t sleep in Schenley Park and they avoid flying over Parkview. They don’t want to encounter this mother owl whose nest was a success last year. The nest is empty right now but its territory is just a half mile from the crows’ current staging area at Frick Fine Arts.
Great horned owl on nest with chicks in Schenley Park, 11 Feb 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
Wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) practice polygyny — many females mated to one male. Their mating ritual requires that the males dance to attract females.
So why are these three, below, strutting together if only one will get to mate with the lady?
Males in wild turkey flocks are usually brothers who collaborate to attract the opposite sex. The less dominant brothers display but won’t become fathers … unless they sneak some action on the side when their brother is not watching.
A week ago I was thrilled to see a raven “herding” a red-tailed hawk into my Oakland neighborhood. The raven had claimed the airspace over the Bloomfield side of the East Busway and was making the hawk fly back to where he came from. No red-tails welcome here!
We have so few ravens in Pittsburgh that I rarely see this kind of action but if I lived in California, as Vance Crofoot does, I’d have a lot of opportunities to watch raven territorial behavior against predators and other ravens.
In this three minute video you’ll see a raven defending his territory against an intruding male. It’s amazing that both birds posture and make soft sounds rather than loud raucous noises.
You’ll also learn:
The size of a raven’s territory.
How you can tell which raven lost the confrontation.
“Birds are classically among the most monogamous of all organisms,” wrote Frank B. Gill in his textbook Ornithology. 90% of bird species form a pair bond in which they commit to work together to raise their young. Swans are well known for it.
Fortunately that type of rivalry is lost in the mists of time.
Humans still value monogamy, which for our species is a spectrum from lifelong to short commitments. People pair up, form partnerships, marry, perhaps divorce, perhaps remarry.
Maintaining a long marriage is hard work. People change over time, sometimes incompatibly. So my husband and I are lucky. We’ve weathered the ups and downs and are even closer now than we were 20 years ago.
A good man is hard to find. I’m very lucky. Today we’ve been married 50 years.
American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) are very intelligent and thrive on solving problems, especially when it comes to food. Those who enjoy feeding crows sometimes provide them with brain teasers in the form of puzzle feeders.
Outside of the breeding season, @Crows_are_SkyCats in Seattle, Washington offers puzzle feeders for crows, young and old. When this video was recorded in February 2022 a group of young crows, members of Seattle’s winter crow flock, stopped by frequently to figure out how to get food from the spinning red containers.
Watch how long it took them to solve the puzzle. These crows are working for kibble.
Laurel and Hardy here have had several tries with this puzzle and finally found a repeatable solution. They worked on this puzzle for 20 minutes in this session. The solution they landed on is physically awkward, but once they landed on it, they stuck with it. I’m experimenting with a way to make it more comfortable to reach & spin.
Murder of crows at staging area in Shadyside, Pittsburgh, 22 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
23 October 2025
Pittsburgh’s winter crow flock is growing day by day to reach its maximum size in late December / early January. As the murder grows they change their evening pathways and foil my attempt to count them.
For a while they’ve been staging in mature trees in Shadyside, then flying west after sunset to an unknown location. But they’ve also spent a couple of evenings staging on my building’s roof and on Cathedral Mansions.
Yesterday I went to Shadyside at 5:30pm to watch them come into the trees. At first each tree had 15 crows, then 20, then 30, then … More crows per tree and more trees with crows.
Murder of crows at pre-roost in Shadyside, Pittsburgh, 22 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)Murder of crows at pre-roost in Shadyside, Pittsburgh, 22 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
They were loud and they were probably annoying the neighbors. Fortunately their visit was temporary. At sunset they departed for points west.
Seven years ago Pittsburgh’s growing murder of crows roosted on Pitt’s campus near the Cathedral of Learning and of course they caused trouble. Crows can’t help it.
Here’s more on crow trouble at home and abroad in a vintage article from 2018.
