A few days ago, I had a morning commitment in downtown San Diego. To avoid the hassle of having to park downtown, I had driven from my suburban house to our nearest trolley stop, next to a local shopping center. After I’d parked, as I was approaching the stop, an outbound trolley disgorged its passengers.
One, a middle aged woman, took a look at the pre-dawn sky just beginning to lighten and remarked to no one in particular, “Ah, crow o’clock, my favorite time to get off the trolley and be out in nature.”
As I followed her gaze, I noticed over a hundred crows circling. Intrigued, I blurted out, “Do they do this every morning?”
“Yeah, it’s their time to get up after roosting in surrounding trees overnight.”
Days are short this time of year. In our part of southern California, we get about 10 hours of daylight. As luck would have it, my downtown stint lasted most of the day, so I returned to my trolley stop just at dusk. The crows again were circling, this time preparing to roost. I’d gotten to see two “crow o’clocks” in a single day.
My neighborhood doesn’t have as many crows as the valley where the trolley runs, but enough of the glossy black birds hang out here to provide near-constant background noise during daylight hours. I’d not paid too much attention, but after my encounter with the “crow o’clock” trolley rider, I decided to do a little online research.
Among the tidbits I picked up: crows make a variety of vocalizations, up to 20 different sounds. Along with the “caw, caw” we typically associate with crows, I’ve started to notice a less loud sound our area birds sometimes make—sort of a cross between a chuckle and the noise of a can being opened with a manual can opener.
Crows mate for life. Both partners participate in building a nest, a new one each breeding season. Once the baby birds hatch, both parents help feed them. Crows typically lay just one set of eggs per year. Out of a clutch of up to six eggs, three or four nestlings may make it to their first birthday. Older crow offspring sometimes stick around for a few years to help with younger nest mates. Crows that survive more than a year may live ten to fifteen years, with the oldest wild crow ever formally banded and studied surviving to nearly thirty. One captive bird in New York lived to be 59.
There are over forty varieties of crows globally, one being the American crow, which ranges through much of the U.S. and parts of Canada. A variety of professionals and amateurs study crows, which have had legal protection since 1972, except when landowners believe the birds are damaging property or livestock (think scarecrows?).
If you are a glutton for crow knowledge, you can find a 90-minute presentation about crows, “To Know the Crow,” on the site of the Cornell Ornithology Lab, allaboutbirds.org. My favorite crow video is a much shorter snippet posted by author Kira Jane Buxton, about a female crow she’s named “Sharkey” who often accompanies her on daily walks.
I’m not motivated to become a serious crow researcher, nor am I likely to develop a crow walking companion like Kira Buxton’s Sharkey. However, as the days slowly lengthen and also become chillier, I think I’ll arrange at least a few more trolley rides to correspond with “crow o’clock.”
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