Bramblings: Crow calls

Photo by Becky Nelson
Wednesday was a perfect summer day.

We finished harvesting a load of hay, I picked some raspberries, squash, cucumbers and tomatoes, and ignored the apples and fall chores that should have been started. I pulled into a parking spot at the farm in front of the barnyard and was watching the cattle in a small pasture just beyond the barn when I heard a noise I had never heard before. It was a quiet afternoon with no machinery running and no one to be heard in the nearby apple orchard, so the natural world was easy to be heard.

At first, I thought the noise was a woodpecker. The clicking sound almost sounded like the bird pecking in short bursts on a hard plastic item, but it was just a short burst of sound. I also thought it might be a squirrel or chipmunk, as I had recently heard a chipmunk making a similar chatter. The sound changed a little bit after a couple of minutes, and I thought perhaps it was a bird clicking its beak and making a coo sound at the end. Unlike a mourning dove, this coo started low and ended on a slightly higher pitch. I was baffled. I started walking as stealthily as I could toward the maple sugar house as the sound was coming from behind the building. I watched the woods beyond as I walked and the watchful eyes of three crows caught sight of me.

The interesting clicking and cooing stopped and the typical intruder crow caws started. They seemed very angry at me for a while and then they flew off. Could that strange sound have been a crow? I turned to my favorite bird watching spots on the internet Thursday morning as I sat down with my coffee, and sure enough, I found the sound was most likely my crow friends. They make the rattling (clicking) sound and cooing sounds when in intimate conversations with each other, usually part of mating or interacting with a young crow. Fascinating.

The Cornell Lab had a series of recordings of crow sounds, and one was similar to the one I had heard, without the coo at the end. I learned that the crow makes about twenty different sounds, and is also a mimic that can match other bird calls and even mimic the sound of humans. This amazing bird has really piqued my interest. I saw a crow eating some road kill of some sort the other day and even snapped a photo of the bird before it flew off from an area near our store. The bird would deftly hop or fly off the roadway when a car approached, and was amazingly talented at avoiding cars and trucks whizzing past.

Crows have always been known as wily critters and intelligent beings. Eating everything, these interesting birds can be horrible farm pests. We have lost lots of corn seed and young corn plants to crows in the past and even mature corn, with crows coming into a patch of corn and pecking right through the corn husk to get to the kernels.

We saw flocks of crows at the farm when I was a very small child, and my father would often hunt them, using a crow call to attract them having learned their various frequent calls to one another. I never heard him mention their “odd” calls like I heard, and he would have been very interested to hear them. More naturalist than hunter, dad was more interested in scaring predators away from crops than killing intruders and was an avid observer and learner. He did once have my mother test the adage about “eating crow” and soon learned why it existed when the inedible horror reached the dinner plate.

The myth that crows like shiny things is just that, a debunked myth, and a good way to repel crows from crops and interesting food sources is to hang shiny objects like “scare tape” and old CDs where they are raiding to keep them away. Crows almost disappeared from the farm in the 1960s and 1970s except for a single pair that my folks called Hekyl and Jekyl. I always theorized that DDT had a lot to do with their demise, but I read that they are also very susceptible to many diseases, with West Nile virus killing huge flocks of crows in the late 1990s.

I also learned this week that bluejays are part of the crow or corvidae family. Often regarded as a bird feeder pest, these big blue birds are some of my favorites, just as their big black cousins the crows and ravens. Edgar Allen Poe certainly had an admiration of ravens, and the Royal Family in Great Britain hires a Ravenmaster to tend the small flock of captive ravens said to protect the Tower of London and the Crown. I don’t take my admiration of the American Crow to such heights, but it is a fascinating species.

Becky Nelson is co-owner of Beaver Pond Farm in Newport, New Hampshire. You may reach her at [email protected].