Local Crow Population

Robert A. Jones’ malignant essay on crows (“Winged Swamp Things,” Nov. 1) portrays the birds as intimidating, invasive, bird-eating trash-pickers. I offer a different perspective. In Los Angeles, it’s a wonder that we see any birds at all. Our “neighborhoods,” which are filled with exotic vegetation, have caused major fragmentation of natural landscapes and native wildlife. To see a wild animal, and one with supreme adaptability and resourcefulness, should be cause for celebration, not indignation.

It is wrong to blame crows for the decrease in the songbird population. In an urban landscape, crows may be considered natural predators, unlike cats, which in the United States kill an estimated 4.4 million birds a day (Audubon Magazine, Nov.-Dec. ‘95). That fact, coupled with the human development of wildlife habitats, makes the killing of citified songbirds by crows insignificant in comparison.

STEVEN SAFFIER

Los Angeles

*

* What Jones wrote about the growing invasion of crows is so true.

When we first came to the San Gabriel Valley we had a walnut grove behind us, inhabited by several families of crows, all of whom disappeared as builders chopped down the trees and built houses.

A few years later the crows returned to the area in large numbers, mainly cawing and strutting around the houses on our block, impervious to shouts and hand clapping designed to scare them away.

Alas, things don’t look so good for us humans; recently, I watched a large flock of crows circling and cawing around a big tree at the end of our street. They divebombed the tree uttering fierce imprecations until suddenly out rocketed a good-sized hawk that flapped madly away with the whole flock of crows in shrill pursuit. Doesn’t look too good for the rest of us, right?

ELSA B. OSTLING

La Puente

*

* I too have noticed an increase in crows flocking around my neighborhood, but I would be hard-pressed to say that they are responsible for reducing the number of species of birds. As one of 12 regional coordinators for the Los Angeles County Breeding Bird Atlas and a block leader, I had the pleasure this year of exploring parts of Culver City in search of breeding birds.

This year alone, in just my three-mile-by-three-mile area, I encountered 22 species (such as hooded orioles, black phoebes, phainopepla, song sparrows, Allen’s and black-chinned hummingbirds, bushtits, scrub jays, common yellow throats, cactus wrens and red-tailed hawks, just to name a few) in the process of nest building or caring for young. I really doubt if crows are as great a threat to avian diversity as is the habitat destruction that occurs daily in our neighborhoods.

I invite interested birders to contact the Atlas central at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum (213-745-BIRD) and see for themselves what kind of species diversity does exist in our metropolitan neighborhoods. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

ELEANOR OSGOOD

Culver City