Once the Bane of Farmers, Crows Are Street-Wise Survivors in Urban ‘Forests’ : Flocking to the City

Eleven-year-old Paula Everett didn’t intend to ruffle any feathers when she picked up a fledgling crow that had fallen out of its nest and began carrying it home to her mother, who nurses injured birds in the San Gabriel Valley.

But a flock of protective adult crows grabbed rocks from the gravel roof of a house and began dropping the stones on the girl’s head. “Mom, the crows are throwing rocks at me,” she complained when she ran into the house, her mother, Judy Everett, recalled.

The avian assault illustrates a fact of modern life in America’s large cities. Big, black, loud, mischievous and intelligent, crows are everywhere.

The birds were once dynamited out of their roosts by the thousands. Now crows and their relatives are prospering as the uninvited guests of their historic enemy, man.

While they haven’t yet become the national bird of suburbia, crows seem ubiquitous in the unnatural “forests” around Los Angeles and other big cities, where they have developed a taste for McDonald’s french fries, birthday cake and cat food.

The crow population in California is growing a brisk 4% a year, according to the federal Breeding Bird Survey. Once shy of man, there are now thousands of crows in residential areas of the San Fernando Valley, Orange County, and the San Gabriel Valley, according to expert estimates.

Crows can be seen rummaging through garbage bins after a party at Encino Park and begging for handouts at the golf courses in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area. Hundreds of the birds gather in a Van Nuys school complex in the evenings.

Ravens, larger cousins of the crow and once thought to be in decline, are reproducing so rapidly in Southern California that biologists want to poison or shoot them to save the desert tortoise. Audubon Society volunteers counted 293 ravens, once a rare sight, in the Malibu area in 1987.

“The population is exploding. It’s kind of like Bangladesh,” said Dan Taylor, western regional representative for the National Audubon Society in Sacramento. Actually, while both species are increasing, California’s crow population is growing a third faster than the human population in Bangladesh.

Daryl Brun of Blue Diamond Growers in Sacramento said nut growers look forward to the arrival of crows at certain times of the year because they clean the trees of “mummies,” worthless fruit that stays on the trees over the winter. But the crow population is accelerating so fast in the San Joaquin Valley--13% a year--that farmers are beginning to complain, according to Cosmo Insalaco, the Fresno County agricultural commissioner.

“There’ll be some requests for action” against the birds, he said.

The population boom parallels a growing appreciation of crows and ravens as eggheads of the feathered world. They learn faster than some monkeys and are able to use tools. An instructor at UC Davis published a paper several years ago in which he suggested that campus crows were purposely dropping walnuts on the road in front of cars, inventing the world’s first gasoline-powered nutcrackers.

A behavioral ecologist at UCLA who has observed 40 families of tagged birds in the San Fernando Valley for four years thinks she has seen even more complex activities.

“They have definite personalities, and they also have friends, and that’s unheard of outside primates,” said Carolee Caffrey, who is working toward a doctorate in crow behavior.

Large, Rural Flocks

Once upon a time, the shaggy-headed ravens were seen infrequently, picking over animal carcasses on the desert or in the mountains. Crows were found out in the country, harassing farmers, though often in big numbers. A flock estimated as big as 1 million destroyed a promising almond industry in Klickitat County, Wash., in 1926.

Such attacks made man declare war on the birds. Communities began dynamiting the huge Midwestern roosts at night. In Illinois 40 years ago, 328,000 crows were killed before a flock abandoned the rural roost.

Susan Drennan, editor of American Birds magazine, said crows migrated to cities after World War II. Bird experts suggest that laws against shooting guns within city limits may have contributed to the movement. Then in 1972, Mexico insisted that crows and their relatives in the corvid family be added to the list of species protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which made the city streets safer than ever for the birds.

“One of the messages we’re getting is that crows are increasingly becoming birds of suburban and urban areas,” said Charles Smith, director of Special Projects for the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “There are plenty of scraps for them from human activities, whether it’s from the local McDonald’s or the bakery.”

Richard Knight, an assistant professor at Colorado State University, found in 1985 that when he approached the nests of urban crows they simply sat there watching. Rural crows always took wing. Knight concluded, “Our results suggest that recent colonization of cities by nesting crows may be in part a response to different levels of persecution in urban and rural areas.”

Bird Census

The most reliable indicator of bird trends is the Breeding Bird Survey of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a census taken since 1965 in 25-mile corridors throughout the nation. The survey indicates that California’s crow population has grown rapidly as suburbs expanded and new urban “woodlands” were created.

“In Irvine we’ve gone from no crows” to the point where they are “one of our most common birds,” said H. Lee Jones, a member of the federal survey team in California.

The Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count has tallied crows, ravens and other species around Los Angeles for several decades. While some experts caution that it is subject to wide fluctuations based on the number of volunteers used and other things, the Audubon Society says the survey can reflect bird population trends. The Christmas Bird Count since 1946 in coastal Orange County, which has seen a tremendous growth in human habitation, shows a steadily upward trend among crows.

Cycles of Growth

The San Fernando Valley counts vary widely, showing an increasing trend from the first bird count in 1958 to 1970, then a falling trend to 1980, followed by a growing trend again. The counts are conducted around Hansen Dam, Encino Reservoir and other bird gathering places. But it doesn’t focus on residential neighborhoods, where the population is thought to be thriving.

“My own opinion is there are many, many more” crows in the San Fernando Valley today, said Irene Langton, treasurer of the local Audubon group, who participated in the first Valley bird count. “There are crows around the homes where there never used to be,” she said.

Twenty thousand crows now gather in one roost on Long Island, N.Y. Ten thousand make their home in a park adjacent to downtown Cincinnati.

Once it was assumed that a large black bird in an urban area was a crow. “But now you can’t say that any more, because ravens are moving in,” said Kristin Berry, a wildlife biologist for the Bureau of Land Management. They can now be seen nesting on buildings in downtown Los Angeles.

Aiming at Ravens

The U.S. raven population has grown 3% yearly for two decades. Ravens are becoming so numerous that wildlife officials have drafted a proposal calling for poisoning and, perhaps, shooting hundreds of them in the Mojave Desert to save the desert tortoise, which is proposed for federal protection as an endangered species. The shells of 250 young tortoises have been found around the nest of just one pair of ravens.

Some experts fear the population explosion will damage other bird species. “It’s going to go very hard on the songbirds,” whose nests are raided by crows, said Lloyd Kiff, curator of Ornithology at the L.A. County Museum of Natural History.

Other experts, however, said they have seen no evidence that urban crows are driving out other birds.

The crow is monogamous, mating for life. It also seems to take family responsibilities seriously. Young adult members of a family often help out at the nest after new birds are hatched. In suburbia, they nest at the tops of tall trees, raiding everything from trash to nuts.

Enjoying a Joke

Those who enjoy them claim they have mischievous personalities.

Caffrey said she has watched crows bedevil one another in play. A San Fernando Valley crow, whom she named Sned, was on the ground looking for food when a crow tagged as Skid flew to a tree and accidentally dislodged flower petals, which floated down and startled the foraging crow.

When Sned returned to eating, Skid walked out to the flower, tore off a petal, leaned forward, and dropped it next to the bird on the ground. Once again, Sned was startled, jumped away, and looked up at Skid. Caffrey said the prank was repeated once more before Sned finally walked away.

“Not only do they play, but they have a sense of humor,” said Caffrey. “That bird could anticipate the consequences of its behavior and was deriving pleasure from it.”

Jerry Rosa of Encino rescued a crow last year that had fallen out of a nest, and raised it in the laundry room of his home. A stickler for authenticity, Rosa dressed in dark clothes, wore a watch cap on his head and squawked when he entered the room to feed the bird.

“I felt like an idiot, of course,” said Rosa.

Tame, Bold

Eventually released by Rosa, the bird visited the Sepulveda Garden Center at Hayvenhurst and Magnolia, several blocks away. “He was real friendly,” said Ron Miller, the chief gardener.

The bird also was rash, eating food out of the dish reserved for Brad, the garden center’s cat.

Some people invest the birds with an almost mystical wisdom. As a young man, Santa Monica’s mayor, Dennis Zane, was hanging clothes on a clothesline when a crow flew up. The bird took the cigarette from his mouth and spat it out. The future politician took it as a sign to stop smoking, so he said he cut down to a pack a day.

Not everyone is charmed. Marge Fox of Burbank said the chattering in the trees “can be annoying. It keeps on until you think, ‘enough already.’ ”

Looks Belie Brains

Bird intelligence is a subject of debate. The fact that a meadowlark will attack a stuffed rival placed in its territory doesn’t do much for its reputation. But Jones believes that “we don’t give birds enough credit,” in part because “they don’t look very much like us.”

Recent studies are challenging assumptions that birds are simple creatures. A study of crow vocalization at the University of Maryland showed that the simple “caw” is used in a variety of ways to signal alert, approaching danger, alarm and all clear. Different social groups have different songs, and when new members join the group, the song changes.

When it comes to complex behavior, “we’re finding out that we as humans don’t have a corner on the market,” said Cornell’s Smith, who kept a pet crow as a child in Tennessee. It bowed its head to be petted and had a fondness for Coca-Cola and Old Crow whiskey.

Knight said crows often outscore dogs on learning tests. They also have the largest volume of corpus striatum, the material in the brain thought to be the seat of intelligence for birds, of any bird yet measured. Humans might have a lot higher opinion of bird intelligence if the first work on birds had been done on crows instead of pigeons, Knight said.

Persistence Needed

Caffrey’s doctoral work has included four years of researching birds living at the Sepulveda Basin in Van Nuys. When she began, she was told that crows are too wary for the detailed field study she was pursuing. “I’m sort of hard-headed,” she said, so she went ahead.

She began trapping the birds with a catapult net. The birds soon recognized her and her car and sent up their alarms even before she reached the golf course where she works. So she put on a Barbra Streisand wig, mustaches and glasses. She also drove friends’ cars when she trapped.

“You have to have a high tolerance for frustration,” she said. But she says her work has paid off with a rare look into crow society.

She has found that the birds allow other pairs to move into an area already being shared by several families. “I don’t see any dominance at all,” she said. “They don’t fight.”

Distinct Characters

The birds have individual personalities, she said. Al, who lives on the 14th tee, takes handouts from golfers at the recreation area. Some crows appear to have friends in other crow families. “Among neighbors, some are together a lot, more than would be expected by random selection,” she said.

“It’s always possible this is a highly inbred population,” Caffrey said. But “what I see is a non-aggressive social structure.”

As she writes up her results, Caffrey is planning a new study of evening roosting behavior, which some ornithologists speculate might be social gatherings where single birds find mates, or for mutual defense. As many as 1,000 birds roost in trees on Balboa Boulevard in Van Nuys, where the campuses of three schools merge. “The trees are black with them sometimes,” said Elaine Hanley, who lives nearby.

“I love these birds, and I’ll never be able to walk away from them,” said Caffrey, whose license plate reads Crowbiz. “I’d be the Jane Goodall of crows.”