The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group. It is a place to note any observations you have made of the world around you. Rain, sun, wind...insects, birds, flowers...meteorites, rocks...seasonal changes...all are worthy additions to the bucket. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, where you are located. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the patterns that are quietly unwinding around us.
October 29, 2015
Salish Sea, PNW
Daylight is fading fast these days, with the sun setting before 6 pm somewhere out there behind our deep cloud cover. Lately it's been near sunset when we beach our kayaks to go home.
Tonight a raucous wheeling murder of crows circled over a small island in the bay as we paddled toward shore, at least 40 of them. Here are some...
(All photos by me. In Lightbox...click to enlarge)
Dancing in the air!
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Explanation? According to Dr. Kevin J. McGowan, Cornell Lab of Ornithology,
For crows, roosts are primarily a fall and winter thing. Numbers peak in winter and then decrease near the beginning of the breeding season (usually in March). It appears that all crows will join winter roosts, even territorial breeding crows....Before heading to roost, crows will congregate in some area away from the final roosting site, usually an hour or two before complete darkness. Here the crows spend a lot of time calling, chasing, and fighting. Right at dark the main body of the group will move toward the final roosting spot. Sometimes this final movement is relatively quiet, but usually it is still quite noisy. I have seen crows coming together from several separate congregation areas, heading to one final staging area where they all coalesce, then everyone heads to the final roost. The final roost can be a cohesive group in a single woodlot, or it can be rather diffusely spread out over quite a wide area of suitable trees.
I wonder WHY they do this?? Any thoughts?
The bay is usually very peaceful now at this time of year with no tourists or traffic. A couple of evenings ago around the same time there was a layer of sunlight through the clouds. Very quiet in the bay. The crows were gathering elsewhere that night.
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You seeing anything odd in the evening these days? All nature observations welcome in the comments.
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