A VERY timely article for me. About a month ago here in Silicon Valley, I noticed that a crow had been violently torn apart and the pieces scattered all over my backyard lawn. I assume the killer was a raccoon--another improbably intelligent animal. How those fat, little ninjas do what they do is beyond me, but one had apparently caught a crow. A few hours after I noticed the carnage, I grabbed a paper grocery bag and some rubber gloves and went outside to collect the crow parts.
As soon as I touched the first piece (a large, black, detached wing), a dozen crows appeared out of nowhere flying in tight circles over my head (about the height of the roof of my 2-story house) and shrieking. They must have been standing watch for hours waiting to see what would happen. Within a minute or so, their numbers had doubled, swarming like bees and screeching. They went so berserk that I thought for sure they would swoop down and peck at me like Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", but they didn't. They stayed up there and screeched the whole time I was cleaning up (maybe ten minutes).
I took the bag over to the recycling bin on the side of the house. Property is expensive, so the houses are close together leaving only a narrow slit of sky above me. The crows followed me and flew back and forth right above the gap, still screeching at me. I hadn't killed the bird, but they were acting like an angry mob blaming the wrong guy.
I was already aware of the studies showing that crows recognize individual people and can bear grudges for years. I was afraid that's what I was going to end up with, but after that event, they never bothered me again, and I see crows around my house frequently. Maybe they DID know that I wasn't the killer, but they had some other agenda. From my perspective, they (and raccoons) are essentially alien intelligences living among us that I always underestimate and still don't understand.
You are right, they are very interesting in their displays of intelligence. One time when I was hunting, there were a group of crows near my camp site. They would come down and investigate where I was staying looking for any scraps of food. As soon as my gun was visible they would all fly several hundred yards away and observe me from a safe distance. Once I put my gun away they would all return back to my camp site to look around.
It was very clear they knew exactly what the gun was, and knew to stay clear of it when they saw it. I never thought about crows the same after that.
My city has a big flock of them that migrate to another city. Some USDA guys chase them around in a pickup truck when the group gets big and chases them away with strobe lights, lasers, distressed crow sound effects and bottle rockets.
When they show up and start settings up, the crows swarm them and poop everywhere. It's pretty crazy.
In many ways yes, because in effect they represent producers' interests, which are often in opposition to the public's and the country's interests.
* Puppy mills fall under USDA regulation, because animals are livestock. The agency has been enabling cruelty on mass scale for years, through failure to police simple standards. http://www.caps-web.org/blogs/our-least-favorite-acronym/
* Grazing federal lands (USDA forest service...) is a subsidy for ranchers that damages via erosion and contamination. I'm okay with that but the cost should be borne by the ranchers and reflected in product pricing, not via the taxpayers.
* Meat inspection is a joke. Have you eaten any prions (CJD, mad cow) lately? No one knows because we don't require bulk testing. Hormones, antibiotics in the farm runoff? Bacterial resistance? You're paying for that in the long run too. Mor USDA failure to protect the public.
The USDA deterrent must be crazy to watch. Lasers pointed at crows? Fireworks? I suppose it would be effective, but it sounds wild (and perhaps cruel in the case of fireworks--they're not shooting them at the animals, are they?)
It is bizarre. The first time I saw it I thought it was just some crazy people.
What happens in the fall and winter is that they roost in mass in large trees in large numbers -- I'm talking tens of thousands of birds.
We tend to get them in our trees in the morning for some reason, and they aren't as active, so it isn't that big of a deal. But a few blocks away they land in the evening and make a lot of noise -- it's almost like car horns.
With the fireworks, they don't aim at them, but almost set them up in a "box" to agitate them. I think the objective is to get them broken up into smaller groups and move off to a less populated area. The freaky thing is the distressed crow noises coming from a PA in the back of the truck.
I've heard of crow distress effects being used to stop them roosting. The idea is to broadcast the noise at odd intervals causing the flock to rise into the air and investigate. Eventually they move on as they never settle properly.
[They stayed up there and screeched the whole time I was cleaning up (maybe ten minutes).]
I probably would have went inside and left the remains to nature. I commend your bravery. It seems like a squad of crows could do some real damage to a person.
Also, I can confirm that raccoons are very intelligent. They're basically like dogs but with more "street smarts". I learned this after trying to get one to leave my attic.
Also, a side note about Raccoons: be sure not to expose yourself to their droppings (for example, if one is living in your attic, don't go and clean up their droppings without proper protection). They can apparently contain some airborne parasite which can kill you in days if inhaled.
The big list of collective nouns for animals is just a made up thing, sort of like a book of poetry.
There are a small number of ye olde Englishe words for some types of groups (like school of fish) and some of the fanciful names from the book have moved into common usage, but the dramatically expanded version is not known to have ever been actually used
I took a wilderness survival course in college that included multiple days in the wilderness for the final. In over 40 years there had only been two deaths. One was dehydration due to a stupid fad diet and the other was hantavirus. It looks like the flu until it's too late. So if you are around mice droppings and get flu like symptoms soon after, get to a doctor soon.
If you are out in the wilderness you are always around rodent droppings. Hantavirus is one of those things that backpacking magazines freak out about, but it's so incredibly rare that there's basically no point in wasting brain cells worrying about it. It's down in the "act of God" ways you might die (meteor strike, lightning, etc...).
Yeah, we were told not to worry too much, just to be wary since someone had died 30 years prior. What I've read is that if you're in an enclosed space with a lot of rodent droppings(say an abandoned cottage or something) then there is some risk, but open air is safe.
That's interesting - do you mean as a part of a social club, or actual scholarly study of survival techniques? Or maybe to support a major in something like archeology? Or maybe a military college?
It's not terribly uncommon for colleges to require some form of physical education like in high school. The motivations are varied -- from legal mandate (for state schools) all the way to subsidizing the athletic staff with tuition dollars for BS courses.
And even where there aren't strict requirements, students sometimes end up with a few extra "free" course credits (e.g. to stay full time for a final semester). Uni staff/faculty are often willing to teach a course like this because it's fun and they get a couple grand for teaching young people about their hobby for an hour every week.
FWIW I took a rock climbing course like this (last semester, had a few extra credits my scholarship paid for in any case, and didn't have time for a real course due to travel). There was just enough "scholarly study" to make the course barely legit (read 2 books and discussed safety techniques in a science-y way), but 99.9% of the time was spent climbing.
It was an actual elective class as part of the "Recreation Management" major at my university, but I took it for fun. We talked about and practiced techniques for building fire, shelter, and tools, as well as foraging for food and being wary of physical and mental problems that arise in survival situations. Supposedly back in the day(70s and 80s) it was actually a month long trek out in the wilderness and some students even took it to make up for some sort of probation for misconduct. For our final exam we just had three nights, two of them alone, out in the Utah desert. Our teacher was a Native American, former Army Ranger who had been doing bushcraft since a very young age.
I don't think any universities in the UK do these kind of diverse elective courses. Sometimes you can do one or two courses from outside your major, but they're courses from another major rather than something entirely standalone. Is this what is meant by a 'liberal arts' education?
The UK aggressively specialises. I started to specialise towards CS at around 16, and started to drop arts and other subjects then, two years before university, and at university I never took anything outside the CS course (apart from one Latin course, but that was unusual because I could already program).
Yup, raccoons faeces can spread several problems: Bayliscaris and other roundworms, Leptospira and some viruses. Airborne spreading rabies from faeces is very rare, but some cases were reported with bats in caves, so should be also a veeeery small probability with raccoons.
Droppings from crows and other birds can spread Parrot fever on the other hand.
Sun rays eliminate several of those problems, like Leptospira. Droppings in the garden should be more "clean" than in your attic.
"Baylisascaris infection is caused by a roundworm found in raccoons. This roundworm can infect people as well as a variety of other animals, including dogs. Human infections are rare, but can be severe if the parasites invade the eye (ocular larva migrans), organs (visceral larva migrans) or the brain (neural larva migrans)."
> Humans in wartime volunteer for suicide missions, too, if they deem the payout for their comrades high enough.
Really. Got any reliable sources on that, using a reasonable definition of "voluntary", based on sources other than veteran war stories[0] and film plots? :-)
(a reasonable interpretation of "not voluntary" includes all people who were forced to join the army because it was the only viable career-option for their socio-economic class)
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it seems highly likely that the perceived frequency of these occurrences must be extremely inflated because it's been in the interest of war propaganda anywhere since forever, to pretend that knowingly volunteering for a suicide mission is not only perfectly sensible, not only extremely noble, but that this is in fact what you already signed up for, so why are you still standing here?
Then there's the question whether this is even relevant in the context of evolution. Soldiers have to be trained and drilled intensively for the explicit purpose of artificially altering their learned instincts which seems to me quite solid evidence of the contrary; that this behaviour is exactly not part of human nature, and that humans by default will not act like this unless you train them to.
You can probably train crows to suicide-attack humans as well.
[0] I realise leaving out this group leaves the data a bit thin on the ground, but given the extreme biases involved, it's useless data. So many stories people would rather not talk about, to name just one bias. Or stories altered after the fact (like they actually drew lots but tell it as voluntary because they are thankful and know it could've been them just as easily).
A decade ago I was driving through a quiet street when a crow limped into the middle directly in line with my tire. I slowed and tried to steer around but the guy seemed intent on limping into his own demise.
Rolling forward at 5 MPH he disappeared under my car only to dart up at the last moment to a telephone line overhead. I looked in my rear-view mirror out of confusion to find that the crows "limp" was in fact a walnut that he was aligning with my tire for me to crack.
They're smarter nowadays; they place the nut on zebra crossings with traffic lights, and wait for the light to turn green (possible using 'pedestrians cross the road' as a clue) before hopping onto the road (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGknpq3e0)
In this area there weren't any traffic controls. The level of planning and understanding that corvids demonstrate in most tasks exceeds anything I've seen from even the smartest of dogs.
Once I was picked on by crows in my neighborhood. A few birds would swoop down and tried to / made a show of pecking me on the head. I picked up fallen twigs about the size of walking sticks which I swung above my head like a helicopter's rotors. Did that a few times and the birds stopped bothering me.
The attacks started after I walked past a crow on the ground that was apparently injured or something. Once I _made eye contact_ (!) with that crow, the others up in the tree went beserk and started the attacks.
That's a ridiculous interpretation of what I said. Nobody I know has ever had to bludgeon an animal to clean their yard, not even the person whose story spawned this whole thread.
> I was already aware of the studies showing that crows recognize individual people and can bear grudges for years. I was afraid that's what I was going to end up with, but after that event, they never bothered me again, and I see crows around my house frequently.
This happened about a month ago, right? I think it's far too early to conclude they don't bear a grudge. Those crows you see around your hours are probably surveilling your habits and movements, so they can plan your demise.
It's no coincidence that the collective noun for a group of crows is "murder".
Burying our dead is a primarily western culture tradition. Many other cultures prefer cremation for example. Why would the birds care how you dispose of the body?
It's possible the birds knew OP wasn't the killer and were hoping to intimidate them into leaving the body alone in hopes of catching the real killer, but that's just a guess.
> It's possible the birds knew OP wasn't the killer and were hoping to intimidate them into leaving the body alone in hopes of catching the real killer,
Or the birds remembered the real killer of their fellow crow but then OP showed up and so therefore, ipso facto, he must've killed the crow but they couldn't know both couldn't kill the crow because they are birds so shriek.
As soon as I touched the first piece (a large, black, detached wing), a dozen crows appeared out of nowhere flying in tight circles over my head (about the height of the roof of my 2-story house) and shrieking. They must have been standing watch for hours waiting to see what would happen. Within a minute or so, their numbers had doubled, swarming like bees and screeching. They went so berserk that I thought for sure they would swoop down and peck at me like Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", but they didn't. They stayed up there and screeched the whole time I was cleaning up (maybe ten minutes).
I took the bag over to the recycling bin on the side of the house. Property is expensive, so the houses are close together leaving only a narrow slit of sky above me. The crows followed me and flew back and forth right above the gap, still screeching at me. I hadn't killed the bird, but they were acting like an angry mob blaming the wrong guy.
I was already aware of the studies showing that crows recognize individual people and can bear grudges for years. I was afraid that's what I was going to end up with, but after that event, they never bothered me again, and I see crows around my house frequently. Maybe they DID know that I wasn't the killer, but they had some other agenda. From my perspective, they (and raccoons) are essentially alien intelligences living among us that I always underestimate and still don't understand.