Here’s Something to Crow About : ‘Jeopardy’ Contestants of the Bird World

They’re loud, they keep odd hours, they have kleptomaniac tendencies, and they’ve been known to vandalize other people’s property. Who needs neighbors like these?

The worst part, says Ralph Berry, a retired auto worker from South El Monte, is their raucous disdain for people.

“Sometimes when I’m out on the patio, they’ll sit on the wires up there, calling to each other, as if to say, ‘Look at this stupid guy here,’ ” says Berry, whose house is on Farndon Street, a shady byway lined with 50-foot-tall sycamore trees.

He’s talking about crows, of course.

They’ve been nesting in the sycamores, roosting on the telephone wires, holding riotous early-morning parties in back yards and--as in communities all around the San Gabriel Valley--generally getting on people’s nerves.

“I’ve often remarked, ‘I wish I had a BB gun,’ ” says Berry’s wife, Lillian, shaking her head hopelessly.

Like them or not, crows are probably one of the San Gabriel Valley’s fastest growing bird populations, say local bird watchers and ornithologists. In an annual bird count sponsored by the National Audubon Society, the average crow tally for the region in the past six years has been double that of an equivalent period in the late 1970s and significantly higher than the state average of an annual 4% increase.

For some, just the familiar appearance of the inky-black birds--with a hint of green or violet in their glossy feathers and their dark, impertinent eyes, which don’t waver at the sight of human beings--is unnerving.

“It’s frightening sometimes,” says Juanita Ruiz, another Farndon Street resident. “You see so many of them, you think maybe they might hurt a child. If there’s a big pack of them, it reminds me of that movie (Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”).”

The crows have their passionate defenders. There’s something appealingly human about a crow, proponents say. Crows mate for life, they probably converse with each other, they use “tools” (hard surfaces to crack nuts), and they cooperate for mutual protection, calling out warnings and mobbing attackers.

Sure, they carry away shiny objects, like golf balls or costume jewelry, but they’re hard to match for pure intelligence. Call them the “Jeopardy” contestants of the bird world.

“Maybe some people don’t like them because they so readily outsmart us,” says Kimball Garrett, ornithologist for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Those who conduct the bird census every December warn against drawing a lot of hard conclusions from the census, which is used to define long-term trends. It’s a one-day endeavor, with results tied to the vagaries of winds and the whims of birds, says biologist Michael Long, director of the Eaton Canyon Nature Center, who heads the annual survey in the San Gabriel Valley.

And it’s focused on a 200-square-mile circle near the center of the San Gabriel Valley. “The circle is somewhat arbitrary,” Long says.

But many residents of cities along the Pomona and San Bernardino freeways say, yes, indeed, they’ve noticed an increase in their corvine neighbors.

“Over on Central Avenue, they have them by the hundreds,” says Juanita Ruiz. “You can watch them pick up walnuts, fly real high and drop the nuts on the pavement. Then they’ll zoom down to pick up the meat. It’s like entertainment for the kids.”

Bird watchers say it’s a combination of the birds’ opportunism and suburban man’s predilection for shade trees and fruit trees, which brings the crows in large numbers to areas such as the San Gabriel Valley.

“Crows are woodland birds,” says Kimball. “It doesn’t matter if the woodland is a native oak savanna, a riparian woodland (along streams) or a more artificial woodland, with trees that people have planted, providing fruits and nuts.”

The San Gabriel Valley not only provides nesting and roosting places, but it also offers grassy areas where the birds can find worms and enough scraps of human food to feed a nation of crows.

Actually, crows have been hanging around towns and villages for generations, says Daniel Guthrie, a Claremont biologist and chairman of the local branch of the Audubon Society. “It probably goes back to Indian times, with crows hanging around villages, eating scraps of food,” he says.

Although longstanding, the relationship can be an uneasy one. In recent years, crows have pecked holes in the turf on the Azusa Green Country Club golf course, rifled through whole shelves full of plants at a Rosemead commercial nursery, dug up freshly planted grass seed at South El Monte City Hall and created a sometimes unpeaceful setting for those resting in peace at the Pomona Cemetery, where a big, garrulous flock of crows descends daily on a row of sycamores.

Down at the Whittier Narrows Nature Center, where dozens of crows roost in the surrounding eucalyptus trees, the attitude is one of grudging admiration.

“They’re not my favorite birds,” grumps Dean Harvey, the director of the county-run center, who acknowledges the birds’ feistiness. “They’re real territorial. They try to chase other birds out of their territory. If hawks or owls come in, the crows gather around to try to get them out of the area.”

A fairly common sight over the San Gabriel Valley these days, bird watchers say, is that of groups of crows in flight formation, rousting the region’s widely admired red-tailed hawks, which sometimes prey on fledging crows. One by one, in a complicated piece of aerial ballet, the crows dive-bomb the powerful raptors until the hawks sail away in frustration.

“Sometimes I get crow calls, with people telling me, ‘You so-and-so, your crows are over here bothering my garden,’ ” says Harvey, flashing a sardonic smile. “I tell them that the crows belong to Fish and Game (a state agency).”

Vern Peaslee, a volunteer at the Whittier Narrows center, walks out to the parking lot carrying a pair of stuffed crows, which he uses in lectures to schoolchildren. The alarm goes up, and a dozen crows start zigzagging overhead, cawing angrily at this two-legged transgressor, who has apparently captured a pair of relatives.

Peaslee, 80, a short, bespectacled man who spouts crow lore, laughs good-naturedly.

“They’re the smartest birds around,” he says. “The only ones that might hold a candle to crows are geese.”

Peaslee says he has seen crows using the shingles on his garage in San Gabriel to crack nuts. “They’ll ram the nuts between the shingles, using them like a vise,” he says.

He contends that crows impose communal discipline at “crow courts,” a kind of flock-wide confab that can end with turf transgressors being pecked to death. “I’ve seen it myself, over at the Santa Anita Golf Course,” he says.

But academicians who have studied crows are skeptical.

“How would you know (if the crows were disciplining one of their own)?” says Carolee Caffrey, a behavioral ecologist at UCLA who is preparing a doctoral thesis on crows. “You won’t until you figure out exactly what they’re saying.”

Caffrey says such communal action is more likely an endeavor to destroy an injured bird, which might attract predators to the flock.

For the past four years, Caffrey has been observing 40 families of tagged crows at the Balboa Golf Course in the San Fernando Valley. For the most part, they’re a sociable, happy-go-lucky bunch, feasting on human leavings.

“You always see crows with their heads down in dumpsters,” Caffrey says.

Although some nest, bringing baby crows into the world, many idle their days away in a sprawling “nonbreeding flock.” These are the fledglings or the mature crows who haven’t paired with a mate. “They loaf a lot during the day,” says Caffrey. “They spend a lot of time doing nothing.”

She has detected patterns of friendship among the crows and personalities, “little patterns of behavior, routines that individuals go through, favorite places they have to sit.”

Crow mating can be elaborate, with Mandarin subtleties and refinements, suggests Caffrey. She tells of Dana and Artie, a crow couple she has watched for several years. “Dana got hit by a golf ball when their kids were two weeks old,” says Caffrey, who has tagged her subjects with the names of friends and relatives.

The biologist carried the wounded female crow to her Venice apartment and nursed the bird back to health. By the time Dana was ready to return to her habitat 10 weeks later, the babies had died, says Caffrey, and Artie had returned to the flock.

“I brought her up to the golf course and let her go, right in the core area (of her studies),” she says. “Then I threw a million peanuts around. When Artie arrived, Dana dropped out of a tree in front of him.” Caffrey imitates the wide-eyed astonishment with which the two crows confronted each other.

“They both bowed deeply, fanning their tails and wings,” Caffrey says. “Then they started walking slowly together around the core area. Every 15 steps or so, they’d stop and bow. It brought tears to my eyes. They’ve been together ever since.”