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.
American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) will eat almost anything from worms, eggs and frogs to small birds and mammals, carrion and discarded human food. The crow pictured above has found a Christmas cookie. Num num.
People who feed small birds often find they are also feeding crows. In 2021 Anthony Abraham saw a video of a puzzle feeder for wild parrots and decided to try it on his local crows in California. Watch how long it took the crows to try the puzzle. It was easy once they got accustomed to it.
October is nut season and the blue jays are busy. We see them flying back and forth on the same route all day long on. What are they doing?
At this time of year blue jays eat acorns from the treetops and carry many more in their gular sacks and beaks to cache at home for the winter. They always go overboard and cache more than they’ll ever eat. So, unintentionally, blue jays are planting trees.
Blue jay parents and grown kids all contribute to storing food in their home territory. Here are some cool facts about how and why they do this. (information is from Birds of the World)
Blue jays are omnivores but during oak mast season their diet becomes 67% acorns.
They also prefer to gather acorns on the tree, versus on the ground.
Each time they fly home they usually carry 1-5 acorns or up to 15 beechnuts, depending on size.
To carry the nuts, they store 2-3 in their distended throat and anterior esophagus + one in mouth + one at bill-tip. The blue jay pictured above has a bulging throat but the acorn in his mouth is too large for him to carry one in his bill-tip.
“Each individual adult probably harvests and eats or caches several thousand acorns, beechnuts, hazelnuts, hickory nuts, or other hard mast each autumn.
This tendency may account for the rapid postglacial dispersal of oaks.” — Birds of the World
The 9-minute video below shows blue jay caching behavior and explains how blue jays probably plant more trees than squirrels!
We think of hurricanes as very dangerous and very devastating but there’s a pigeon-sized seabird, the Desertas petrel (Pterodroma deserta), who nests during hurricane season because it chases hurricanes to feed its chick.
High on a rocky plateau [on Bugio Island], one small nocturnal seabird is nestled in its burrow, where far below waves lap gently against the cliffs. In the blackness of night, it senses a storm brewing 1,000 miles (1609km) from the coast of Morocco.
Bugio Island is well situated for chasing hurricanes, all of which are born as tropical depressions off the coast of Africa, travel west to the Americas, then swing north.
When scientists put data trackers on Desertas petrels and tracked them for five years, 2015-2019, they found:
Desertas petrels make some of the longest foraging trips ever recorded in any species – traveling as far as 12,000km (7,460 miles) over deep, pelagic waters – all the way from Africa, to the New England coast and back again.
Unlike most seabirds who circumnavigate hurricanes or try to stay inside the eye of the storm, the Desertas petrel actively chases hurricanes, braves incredible winds, and captures food churned to the ocean’s surface in the wake of the hurricane.
They put themselves exactly in the right place at the right time to be run over by a hurricane.
Preening is really important for birds because it’s the only way to keep their feathers in tip-top condition. They use their beaks to remove dirt and parasites, waterproof their feathers with preen oil, interlock feather barbules, and set each feather in its proper place. To reach all (*) their feathers, their necks have to be very flexible.
Yesterday Carla, the female peregrine at Univ. of Pittsburgh, spent several hours preening in front of the nestbox. Sometimes she looked like a contortionist.
In the photo below, can you find her head and beak? They aren’t where you think they are.
(*) p.s. The only feathers birds cannot reach on their own are the ones on top of their heads. That’s where they need a buddy to help. It’s called allopreening.
Some adult peregrines in eastern North America stay on territory year round. The Pitt peregrines at the Cathedral of Learning are one such couple.
With the breeding season over and their youngsters dispersed Ecco and Carla stay home and watch fall migration pass through Pittsburgh. Most migratory birds are of interest as a food source while raptors are watched in case they become a threat.
At night Ecco and Carla roost on the Cathedral of Learning and see each other during the day. They won’t need to court until early next year but they strengthen their pair bond by bowing at the nest a couple of times a week.
Common ravens (Corvus corax) mate for life and stay together year round on their territory, defending it against other ravens. Since they typically live 10 to 15 years or as much as 23 years in the wild, the pair has lots of opportunity to strengthen their pair bond including aerial displays and strutting on the ground. Less often seen is their quiet way of communicating affection.
What happens when two owl species meet in the dark? If one of them is a great horned owl the other owl is frightened away. Great horned owls (Bubo virginianus) will eat anything including other owls.
Last year an Oswit Land Trust trail cam in Southern California picked up an unusual encounter. An American barn owl (Tyto furcata) was cooling its feet and drinking water when suddenly a bigger owl flew in. The great horned owl landed at the barn owl’s spot while the barn owl vaulted into the air and landed at a distance.
Great horned owls weigh more than 2.5 times that of barn owls. Naturally the barn owl was wary but he must have been very thirsty. Eventually he re-approached the watering hole.
video embedded from Oswit Land Trust on YouTube
Note that when the video began at 7:49p the temperature was 100°F but dropped to 98°F 23 minutes later at the end. It was hot and they were both so thirsty!
p.s. Did you know that barn owls were split into three species?
that Barn owls used to be one species, but DNA evidence revealed they are very different across their disjoint range. So they were split into three species last year.
The breeding season is over for brown-headed cowbirds in Pittsburgh. The adults courted constantly while the females were fertile but egg-laying stopped in mid-July. By now all the youngsters have fledged and left their hosts to join flocks of cowbirds. These youngsters were raised by another species so how do they know what flocks to join? A new study found out their parents have nothing to do with it.
If the biological parents don’t care for it, why doesn’t the young cowbird stay with its host species?
Unlike most birds, a young brood parasite doesn’t get attached to its host parents. You can see this if you rear cowbirds by hand, said Mark Hauber, a comparative psychologist at CUNY Graduate Center in New York: “They start hating you at some point.” If a cowbird imprinted on a family of yellow warblers, say, and sought out warblers’ company as an adult, it would never find a mate and reproduce.
Early studies on how the youngsters discover their own species found that young cowbirds are attracted to the chattering calls of adult females, prefer to associate with birds whose plumage matches their own (immatures and females look similar), and many even hang out with their mothers.
However, the new study published in ScienceDirect in August conducted DNA tests on groups of immature cowbirds and adults captured together and found that the youngsters always hung out with females but they were never related to them.
Somehow, Chamberlain says, they bump into adult cowbirds and start hanging around them and learning how to behave. But the clock is ticking: By the end of the summer, the juveniles and adults will migrate south.“They have a short time period in which they need to learn these things,” Mr. Chamberlain said.”
