Yesterday, a cluster of crows (four or five of them) decided our daffodils were The Enemy, and attacked them with a will. They had a preference for jonquils over monochromes (ours are mostly yellow-centered) but took to the monochromes when the bicolors were done for. Mostly they shredded the flower, leaving the stem and leaves untouched; but in one case (I had only about two minutes for observation) a particularly large crow grasped the stem of a large monochrome (about an inch or 1.5 below the flower head) and pulled mightily as if to separate the head from the stem. Curiously, the crows had no interest whatever in several varieties of mini-daffs.
I have never before seen behaviour anything like this from crows, and wonder whether anybody else has seen it.
We live in rural Nova Scotia, about an hour outside Halifax. My wife suggested that these crows had visited a marijuana grow-op before coming to our yard.
As a footnote: I sprayed the daffodils that evening with a blended and strained mixture of water, hot red peppers, and vinegar (the proportions depend on the heat of the peppers): apparently crows hate that!
Martin Kilmer
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martin
Martin Kilmer
East River, NS
902-275-2114
Martin –
25 crows landed in the front yard and quickly took aim at a bed that had
been replanted that previous fall.
feet wide, they decimated it before I could start screeching and clapping
at them.
ground.
tags and tossing them in the air over and behind himself. A lot of cawing was going on, as if in appreciation
of each other’s antics.
neighbor remarked about the nightly influx of crows to a couple of the large
trees in the area. I suspect that they were looking for a new roosting
area. After a few weeks they quit coming so I figure they found someplace
more appealing.
yard and watch the nightly parade back to the roosts. One night I quit
counting at 500.
highrise on one of Cincinnati’s hills. From that lofty perch you can see
thousands, long black streaks headed to various locations.
Maybe they thought the flowers were crowcus…
Folks, I cut in here just to say that a group of crows is called a Murder!
Ian
Hi All,
This is a bit reminiscent of my experiences with our native bird, the pukeko. They do not attack flowers but busy themselves pulling out stakes and having a go ar emerging foliage. Fortunately they discover the toxic value of daff leaves fairly quickly and are also disturbed easily by the walking scarecrow (me!). I have erected wind breaks around the perimeter of the daff plantings and although they can fly (in a clumsy fashion) this seems to have deterred them.
We don’t have crows in NZ – thank goodness.
Cheers,
Peter
Brian,
And the remainder of the Daffodil world. The American crows scavenger solitary or in small groups, but they seem to like to roost at night in one area that is like hundreds or thousands in the roost. It’s easy to tell which is which as one has an almost square tail and the other a more pointed tail when in flight.
clay
Ours here tend to be clans of maybe a score or more. Of course, there’s different species across N. America and I’ve never closely noted just what they are. On a happier birds and daffodils note, the last two evenings, immediately in the rows of “pheasant-eye” poet daffodils, I’ve been greeted by a rather loud ring-necked pheasant. Hopefully he hasn’t mistaken the blooms for his hens. Regardless, someone’s on patrol against crow attack! I should say also, it’s been a banner year for Recurvus blooms (at least what I grow as Recurvus; we’ve had a little discussion lately on this subject on the historic daff listserv). Although the blooms are smaller than usual this year, there are more than I’ve ever seen. I’ll take this to mean they like excessive amounts of rain.
Drew Mc Farland
Granville, Ohio
Interesting Wikipedia article about crows and how they are classified. Particularly interesting are the remarks in the first couple of paragraphs about their intelligence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow
Tom Roche
Tom,
You have to watch Wikipedia. There effort is to dumb down the world with “close but no cigar” information but in by people less than experts or subject matter experts.
When I see Wikipedia on my search, I immediatly look for a more reliable source.
Clay Higgins
Clay,
You are quite correct, but it varies with the subject matter. Just like any material on the internet, it is not the be all and end all. It’s often a good start though and can point you to more professional and/or reliable sources.
Tom
Many schools do not allow Wikipedia as a reference in school papers because if the uncertainty of its accuracy.
Colleen NE Calif.
Colleen,
That is true, but the reason is also that it’s often like a complete paper ready made for students. For the same reason, many teachers discourage students from using encyclopedia articles as research sources. In both cases, they want students to use original sources as research material rather than having someone else do that work for them.
Oddly enough , Wikipedia, unlike most other things on the internet, attempts to have a self-correcting dimension. If I write something outlandish on Wikipedia, chances are someone will pick up on it and it will be corrected. If I did the same thing on my own webpage–if I had one– no one would be able to correct it. So, really, I would argue that one shouldn’t happily accept as truth anything that one reads without having a bit of skepticism. It’s always a good idea to check sources in any media.
Tom Roche
My husband and I are pretty good birder’s so I did a little research in our bird books. Crows figured out a long time ago that plows exposed grubs, one of their favorite foods, so flocked to recent plowed fields. You can see the problem, bulbs look like very big grubs. Probably a dead crow in the field is the best deterrent. North America does not have rooks, even if Poe tried. We have the common crow, or American Crow, the Fish Crow and Tamaulias Crow. The Raven and Chihuahuan Raven are also in the same family ‘corvus’. Common crows are all through North America, Fish Crows on the Atlantic, the Mississippi River basin and Alaska. They are hard to tell apart as the Fish Crow is a smaller version of a crow. Ravens are much bigger, 24″ compared to 15″ for both common and fish crows. They have a heavy beak and a wedge shaped tail. Good luck in keeping them out of recently plowed fields!
Barbara B. Tacy
Brian –
I am not a bird expert but I don’t think we have Rooks here. Think Rooks are a European and Asia species? What’s here is named the American Crow. But if I had to choose, I’d take crow over deer any day!
To anyone interested, there was a Nature program on PBS awhile ago about crows.You can watch it on the Web: http://video.pbs.org/video/1621910826 This is one time when Wikipedia has it right!
They’re smart.
Linda
Wikipedia gives the Distribution and habitat of rooks as ……..
Though resident in Great Britain, Ireland and much of north and central Europe, vagrant to Iceland and northern Scandinavia, it also occurs as an eastern race in Asia where it differs in being very slightly smaller on average, and having a somewhat more fully feathered face. In the north of its range the species has a tendency to move south during autumn though more southern populations are apt to range sporadically also. The species has been introduced to New Zealand, with several hundred birds being released there from 1862 to 1874, though today their range is very localised.[5] There the species is an agricultural pest and it is being eradicated.
Hello All,
I have had to eat crow! I have been informed by two New Zealanders that there are crows in New Zealand. Apparently there are crows in the Hawkes Bay and on Banks Peninsula. There has even been a “crow warning” in the Waikato where we live. Fortunately they are not widespread here and there is a good eradication policy in place. Let’s hope it works. It is a pity there isn’t a similar policy for pukeko.
Cheers,
Peter