 It's your membership in Maine Audubon and your county Audubon that enables us to put on these programs. So we greatly appreciate your membership and support. And if you're not a member, we're delighted to certainly have you consider being one. If you live in your county and you become a member of Maine Audubon, you are then automatically a member of your county Audubon. So it's a good two-for-deal, an excellent one. So before we get to tonight's program, I'll just mention briefly that we have another exceptional program lined up for next month on Tuesday, March 16th. At same time, 7 p.m., we're going to be joined by Edwin Scholes, who is the leader and project leader, project founder of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Birds of Paradise Project. And he spent the last 20 years or so documenting in the field all 42 species of birds of paradise, mostly in New Guinea and that part of the world. And it should be an exceptional program. So please join us on March 16th as well. And tonight, we have a program about a bird that is not quite as colorful as Birds of Paradise, but still a fascinating bird. It is the American crow. I think some fish crows thrown in as well that have been roosting every night during the winter for many years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. And joining us tonight for this program are Bob Fox and Dana Duxbury Fox, who we are delighted to have with us. Bob was co-author of the 19th, excuse me, 2013 definitive work, The Birds of New Hampshire, that documented the then 427 species of birds that had been observed in New Hampshire. He was also involved in the founding of the Manomet Institute, a wonderful bird science and conservation organization. Dana has been a birder for decades as well. They've both been birding for over 50 years. They've observed the number I saw probably higher now, 6,500 species around the world. Dana's also been studying loons for decades. And we're delighted to have them here tonight and talk to us about this amazing crow roost phenomena. Couple of last notes. After the program, we'll be having a Q&A. So if you have any questions you'd like them to take a crack at, please feel free to hit the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and type in a question at any point during the program. And one last plug as well, our standard monthly plug, keep your cats indoors. Your birds and bird of friends will greatly appreciate it. And now, so without further ado, I'd like to turn it over to Bob and Dana and proceed with the show. Thank you very much for being with us here tonight. So if you just hit share screen. I'll go back here and do this. Sorry. That's okay. We're getting there. Just hold a second. Yeah. We're enjoying the shot of you and Bob. Oh, well, that you don't know need. Okay. Share screen. Here we go. Alrighty. Good. Good. That looks great. Fine. I will see you with some questions at the end of this program. Thank you very much, Bill. We really appreciate it. And we are so appreciative that so many of you have turned in tonight. Bob and I are here to talk about those awesome crows of winter. And they're really corvids during COVID. I with my Massachusetts accent often pronounced COVID is COVID. So it just works out very well. But tonight we're going to share with you this this wonderful experience that we have had over the past few years. Our goals tonight are to observe the crows to study and document their staging and roosting behavior and to share this awesome experience with others. This is an outline of what we're going to talk about tonight. Crows are not what are called corvids, major features of crows, the crows in Massachusetts and Maine, the history of this of winter pro roost and the Lawrence crow roost. Would like to start out with some artsy things. It's interesting that this first picture to the left was one of the first pictures that we can find in the US of a crow. It was listed when Alexander Wilson actually depicted it as Corvus Carone, which is the European crow. At that point, they had not identified it as a separate species. And over on the right, you can see his fish crow, and he was the first one to describe it when he later on, oops. Next we have the pictures of Audubon and Fuentes. You can see that Audubon depicted the American crow in 1833 and two years later, the fish crow. Fuentes depicted these in 1923 of the American crow and the fish crow. It's interesting to watch how these people depicted birds as time went on. Van Gogh actually depicted crows over these wheat fields in an 1890 painting. And Winslow Hummer in 1993, 1893 depicted crows over this fox in his painting called Fox Hunt. Moving much further afield on Echelbury in 1951 depicted crows. But I love this. Don't you love this, Rudy? Hirstel Meyer in 1990, it looks more like a raven, but look at the boots on this bird. Isn't that fun? Barry Van Dusen has produced, who is an artist in Massachusetts and is illustrating quite a few field guides these days, has produced some of these paintings of crows. This one is now in my personal collection. And now Bob is going to share with you information about the family of birds. Yes, it's great to be with all of you and to have such a large audience. We normally don't have audiences quite this big, but I think it's wonderful that that number of people are out and interested. First talk about COVID is a family. There are three parts that we know about in that family. The Jays, you don't think those are part of them, but that's one part. The bad parts are a second part. And then a third part are the 40 species of crows and ravens. Things that we're going to talk about for the rest of the evening. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Sorry. All right, sorry. Well, while she, I think you can hear me while she's getting organized on getting this next picture up. The, the scientists use a lot of different names for the different levels of crows from the largest down into the small species. And so those names of them, that's not worth worrying about. But as you start to get used to the idea of how they lay, and that's what we're going to get into here in just a minute. They, the original crow tribe, if you want to call it that, the largest element that includes the crows was a some birds that ended up on Australia, interesting enough. And as Australia was on a plate back 50, 60 million years ago, drifting across the Pacific, it came into the area of Southeast Asia. And when it got close enough to the continent, this whole family just jumped off and landed and settled in there. And that's the first time they really decided to divide up into various elements, and that's coming along in just a minute here, I hope. Anyway, so this is a little tricky and the map that I'm going, I'm going to use a map first and then I'm going to use a word slide to go back over because it takes a little while to get used to it. Here's the map now. And if you see down there, you can see Australia down there. And you can see it is sort of moving up towards Southeast Asia. And we're going to start with the black arrows that come off, because the ancestors are that first black arrow that comes over and landed in Southeast Asia. Then as you can see, it began to radiate and two groups that came off went to the left and one went down into Africa and the other came over into sort of North Central Europe. And so that was a major move. Now, there's a third arrow coming out from there and that's the interesting one perhaps for us because that is the Jays. Remember, I showed the picture of the Jays a few minutes ago and that's how the Jays evolved. They moved north in Asia, crossed over what is the Bering Sea now. But remember, this was during the Ice Age and a lot of the water was on the land and so this was a land bridge and things couldn't go right across like from one tree to another. So the Jays came across and the arrow shows you them coming down through North America and they actually came down and there are a lot of Jays in Central America and even a few down in South America. So that was a very healthy move at that point. Now, the next move is the Central Group that was spawning all of these things gradually moved up in Asia and now going on to the red lines and you see three red lines also to merge or start up there. The first one again, as that group of Corvids was starting to evolve, had a group that went over into the Europe and African area from there. And a second one came south which is quite surprising. It went back and settled down in Australia long after the parents had left. But the third one is the one that we want because as you see that like the Jays goes up, crosses over and comes down into North America. Now, when it got to the very north in Siberia there was one bird and they split into two. One went back to Europe, the Koran that we were talking about earlier and the one that crossed over into Alaska, it became the American crow, the one that we all know. And you can see it came down and settled all of North America. Also, as you wonder what happened to the Ravens, the Ravens followed along very shortly after and managed to cover the surface between the very northern part of Eurasia and North America. They stayed there, limitedly working down into the lower parts. So while we're waiting for the next slide to come up, I might say back in the 1980s, this map was created back in the 1980s by the things. OK, we have another thing. It's sort of a regret of what I was just saying. 53 million years ago, that's a long time ago, as Australia was moving close to the northern landmass of Southeast Asia, the ancestral COVID. A million years ago, the family of COVIDs, called COVIDEye, evolved in Northeast Asia. And 17 and a half million years ago, I mean, time is going by fast, the genius of crows evolved in the Paleotic, where the little red lines did. Five billion years ago, the American crow evolved in Siberia and then radiated into North America. And four plus years ago, the fish crow evolved farthest down in Asia, but came up and crossed as did the American crow. But instead of staying just in North America, it came down to about the Mexican border and went across, so the fish crow developed for us down in southeastern United States. And as you know now, we're starting to move up into North America. This is a picture that Dana and I took when we were over in Buchan. If you want to see a large-billed crow, this is technically a large-billed crow and it certainly has a large bill. And it's sitting on those little pretty pink flowers. Those are Rotor Dendrons. Buchan is loaded with species of Rotor Dendrons. And that's one of our other hobbies. We have about a hundred Rotor Dendrons kicking around our house outside and we're running a test on them. Here's some facts about crows that I think we will find interesting. Crows are a genus, that's the smallest group, of the family called corvids. The species of crows have in general similar body shapes. They look alike. They have a strong stout legs that you can see by the little picture up there. They are well-clawed and very grasping feet. They can grab almost anything. They have large heads and of course there are a lot of brains in there but a very distinctive bill. And so that is one of the things about all the crows in the world. Crows have been noted in most of the American Indian cultures because they would hang out around them. The American Indians appreciated the humor and the interest and the whole behavior of crows. And so they always kept recognizing them. They are highly intelligent. They're very, I'm always surprised at some of the things they do. They can outsmart us, I'll tell you that. And they are very social, meaning they like to do things together. They have, in part of their life, they will have a family and the parents will, there'll be two parents, there'll be probably two young. And then the second year, the parents and that first group of young, those if they haven't gone off in their room will stay and help the parents raise the next thing. So it's not uncommon for if you have a crow family around, there'll be four or five birds. The things that are most interesting tonight that they are cooperative breeders, which I just explained, but they are communal winter roosting birds. And that's what we're gonna talk about for the rest of the evening. Oh, I'm still talking a little bit more how you tell them apart, which is I think a good idea. These obviously are American crows. These are gorgeous pictures of the shows. You can see on this American crow, take any of the three of them. See the pantaloons as they like to call them. The little black feathers that come down to the joint. That's characteristic. Now see how heavy a bill it has, a very thick, heavy bill. And of course, those big legs and those big feet. So those are good real pictures of crows. Now here is the fish crow. Frank Rickstuber was taking some pictures of them and this shows them. See on either picture here, the tiny feet. See how tiny they are. How short the legs are. And notice the bill is not nearly as big and heavy as the other one. And we'll get on to some other difficulties, but they are necessarily small. You will be able to see fish crows, not commonly now, but they are coming up in Maine and every year you'll be seeing more of them. So you want to learn how to tell them apart. Fish crows are smaller and have thinner bills. Look at the pictures, including the one on the upper right hand corner, which is the best thing. And the other one that's over there, the left hand one of the left hand top picture there. See how thin the bills are. See how short the legs are compared to the American crow on the right. The fish crows don't have any of those pantalooms like things hanging down to their knees. And fish crows sit and add a more parallel to the ground. In other words, an American crow has its head up and he's sort of almost looking up over the next wave, but the fish crow is at the back is sometimes almost close to being horizontal when you see them. American crows do, when they're wandering around, the American crow will take one step and if it's with a fish crow, the fish crow has to take three steps to keep up with it. They're cute to see. And we often see them now, you can probably see them in Maine if you do them. This particular set of pictures by Louis Bivier shows the fish crow on the right being chased and notice the size of the feet. And the bill on the left. And notice the side of the American crow on the right there with their huge feet, big wings and a big, heavy bill. They are different and you'll be able to tell the differences. This is just a little picture that we took when they were moving north one April and you can see them out in this sort of rough area here in Lawrence and you can see a couple of American crows standing big and with their heads right up. And in the background, you can see most of the birds there are fish crows and that small sized load of the ground, horizontal look to them. They're quite distinctive when you get to know them. And now I'd like to share with you some information about the growth in numbers in Massachusetts. We see here from a breeding bird survey of both the American crow on the left and the fish crow on the right, the number changes. You can see that in about 2000, you had a great drop in the number of American crows. This was due to that despicable virus that attacked the crows at that point. They have been increasing in numbers since then, but for the fish crow, you can see this very rapid increase in this area of the world. Here's Christmas count data. And again, you can see the drop there of the American crows, but again, the sort of stabilization of them, but that dramatic rise in the fish crow numbers. I've been trying to find out more and more and see crow migration myself. And this year, the end of October, I was sitting at the Woodmont Orchard in Hollis, New Hampshire. And I observed for the first time crows migrating. They came across the street from my left. They went across the road up to my right and over the orchard and disappeared to the Southeast. But amazingly, that's at that same time, there were people on Mount Wachu said hawk watching and they recorded in their non-raptor part of their report that that particular day they had had this extensive large number of American crows. And I then went and calculated the direction from the Woodmont Orchard to Mount Wachu said, also the distance and saw that the crows that I was seeing an hour later would have been down at Mount Wachu said. And in contacting the hawk watches, I was able to calculate that there, the time that they had seen it was the same time that I had. One interesting thing about that, we counted 1,200 crows coming across the fields and heading towards there. They had 1,200 crows at the road. You talk about nailing down something that really sort of fits together. That was an amazing day in the field. This is quite a busy overhead here for these migrating crows in Maine. Bob gathered some of this data from both Palma and Vickery's books. And I love the one in the 1900, the first one where it was 10 rods wide and took a quarter of an hour to pass over a given point and the rod was 16.5 feet. Also under the last example, fish crows were first reported at Bowdoin in 1976 and First Bread in 1978. So you can see how they have moved into Maine as well. What is a communal winter road, roost? And why would crows roost communally? Communal winter roost is a place where crows gather in the wintertime. And they come in and they pack in closely, usually on the top in our area of deciduous trees, sometimes in other areas it's coniferous trees. And they do this, it is hypothesized to either learn about food supplies. In other words, where did the birds beside them find good foods that day? Or to avoid predators? Well, the Maine and natural predator of the American crow is the great horned owl. And of course, man has also been a great predator of the owls there. But they feel that if they're in these roosts tightly packed, they can easily, quickly someone can alert them to a predator and they can protect themselves. I was reviewing the history of crow roost and they go back to, the history goes back to the late 1700s. At that time they were rural and they, some were very large, particularly ones in the Midwest. But in the 1700s, these crows, 1970s, crows moved into the cities. Amazing brilliance on their part. We don't allow hunting in cities. They had been persecuted in the rural areas. There's a report in one roost where people, hunters went in at midnight and shot until daybreak, purely for the desire of killing the birds, nothing else. I'd like to tell you about a recent study This is a study that was done by Andrea Townsend. It was reported in the ARC in 2018. It was about a crow roost in Utica, New York. She used satellite telemetry, stabilizer topes and molecular markers. And she found that the resident crows, i.e. those are the crows that nested within 16 miles of the city. We say 20 miles of the roost were there. She found migrant crows that had migrated at least some of them as many as 493 miles to the northeast between the latitudes of 44.4 and 48.4 north. And she was able to estimate that 80% of the crows in her roost were migrants. Now, this is, this comes up, this is her study results. On the left in red is that she was able to put a satellite tag on one resident crow. And Utica is up in the upper right. And you can see where the crow went when it was up in the Utica area. But it went down to Clinton, New York to breed and was in and out of Clinton during the breeding season. On the right is the map of the five migrant crows that she was able to tag. And you can see the tremendous distance to the northeast that they traveled to breed. Now, on the lower right is the graph showing the analysis of the feathers. There's a deuterium level that is laid down in the feather of a bird as it is developed on the bird. Crows actually lose their feathers and put in on new feathers in September while they're still on the breeding latitude. So she was able to examine the feathers of the birds that were there under her roost and also the ones on the satellite tag ones. And she could see that the majority of those that she examined were birds that had been put on in a latitude that was far to the northeast. The history of the Lawrence crowries. It was the first recorded in Bird Observer magazine in 1989 and throughout the 1990s, people reported on the Lawrence crows. The first fish crow was reported in that roost in 1994. And all records were from around the Merrimack River in the city. We visited the roost once each winter from 2013 to 2017. But from the fall of 2017, we've now visited the roost over 400 nights during these past four winters. Initially, most nights they staged in a different place first than roosted in the same place. Staging is what they do when they come in from either where they have nested, I'll tell you more about that in a minute or where they have spent the day feeding and they remain there until a certain point. And after it's dark, they move into the roost location. Here's a map showing 20 miles radius from Lawrence. So you can see that the crows that are coming into Lawrence are coming from a tremendous distance all the way over to the coast in Newburyport, down a bit north of Boston, out into Southern New Hampshire and Westford mass, low mass, quite fascinating. Now these are some observations on staging that Bob and I have been deducing. This is something you're seeing that's never been in print yet. So we're gonna share this with you tonight. But we believe that the initial crows that come into Lawrence to stage are resident crows. And resident crows come in from their nesting territories either singly or in small family groups. This was documented by a professor named Kakamai in New Jersey where he had them tagged and could see that the birds left their nesting territories in the afternoon, went into the roost and then returned to the next day. I have a friend here in North Andover who sees this happen on a daily basis. She has a family that nests in the yard next door. They come back every morning. They're there during the day. And in the afternoon, they go into the roost. Many of these resident crows come in early, even pre an hour before sunset. And they seem to determine where they will all stage that night. Fish crows also come in early and they seem to stay together. Some nights we've seen them in different parking lots. In Lawrence, you know, there's a fish crow parking lot or there's a gathering of fish crows. It's interesting how they aggregate when they come in. They're also feeding often during this period on bittersweet buckthorn or crab apples. Later in the afternoon, large flocks of migrant crows come in closer to sunset. They follow flight lines into the city. And... See if I can go back. We've lost a bit there. There's a pattern that we've noticed of when the crows come in. And you can see in October there that we're getting mainly the resident crows. And then the migrants arrive and the migrants begin to leave as late February occurs. And we've been counting the crows and trying to document this from year to year. This is a map showing some of the locations in Lawrence where the birds gather. That duck bridge in the center with that blue circle is the traditional initial roosting spot for the crows. And they may stage anywhere on the north or south side of the river and after sunset, they will move into a final staging area right near the roost site. And when it's dark, now after sunset and after it's dark, they will move slowly into the roost. This is another map showing one year after they had been in the roost for a while. In the end of December, they suddenly moved over to the west onto the ice of the frozen Merrimack River to the west of there. And then they took this tremendous counterclockwise circle up into upper reaches of the city and made a counterclockwise circle and eventually came back along the southern edge of the Merrimack River. This shows you a Google map of the city of Lawrence. You can see how densely it's populated and that one open area up in the top there was that area where they moved to once they left the ice, which is a large three cemetery complex. Here is the, I'm gonna show you now some pictures of their staging. Here they are staging on the north side of the river. Some of them already in trees and many of them, as you can see, peppering the skies above. Here are some very attractive pictures taken by Betty Wiley. It's absolutely beautiful to come and see the crows when there is a sunlit sky and with the clock tower there of the New Balance factory building and the many church steeples that pepper the sky of Lawrence, it makes it very impressive. Here we have a video that I'm gonna show you. This was taken January 13th. That was just taken January 13th of this year. Just a few months ago, seems to wanna show it again, but it's worth seeing. Notice the way the birds sit on the tops of the trees first and notice how this is a, we call this a river of crows the way they go along. It isn't a stream, it's a river and here you get a swirling thing. That's another behavior thing that we like to see. Here are some pictures again taken of that night where the sky was so beautiful of again the church tower and the clock steeple. You can see here are some pictures taken later in the evening. Often some of them will gather on the ground as they are getting ready to slowly move into the roost or they'll be sitting in nearby tree tops. I like this one. This is the tower and a few crows. It was not eight o'clock. Somehow the clock was not working that night properly. Now, one night we were at a not all on a theological club meeting and we mentioned we'd seen 10,000 crows sitting on the ice that night in Lawrence and someone came up to us and said, we'd love to see the crows. Could you take me there? So we took him there the next night. Lo and behold, we went to that exact spot and there wasn't one crow on the ice. Talk about embarrassing situation. But suddenly we saw crows going along above the trees on the southern side of the river. We got in our car and followed the north side of the river till suddenly about a mile out the crows turned at a right angle and moved over us and went up the hill. And they moved up to that cemetery that I showed you. And these are some stills of that. But this is what I wanna show you. I'll never forget this night. The black crows, the white snow and the monuments in the- She just like holding a camera out the window. She got that picture. I mean, it's really amazing what pictures you can get. And the crows actually are sometimes staging in the city. This is one taken just the other night early on, just an hour before sunset. And you can see the number of crows here on the ice. This shows where they are. They're west of the Route 28 bridge in the frozen Merrimack River. We were standing in that Riverside State Park location at that point, but we also go down to the Abe-Bashara Boathouse to observe them. Here it is later in the cycle of the evening. And you can see farm, many more crows have now joined the original. These are not taken from the same night, but it is meant to show you how when the crow, the migrant crow flocks come in later on, there is a far greater density of crows. This was taken by Erica just a couple of nights ago from the Boathouse, the picture on the left looking out over the river. And the crows absolutely love the ice. I thoroughly enjoy these two pictures on the right. The above one was a group of crows sitting on an ice flow, floating down the river. They were happy as pigs in muck and they just were floating along. Below it is a picture of an immature bald eagle that the crows were very disturbed within harassing. You can see one of them. And these are Bob's pictures here on the right. Now roosting, half hour after sunset, they begin to slowly move into the roost from a nearby staging area. The roost is usually no more than a kilometer from the final staging area. And it's dark and they sit very close together and they noisy at first and suddenly they quiet down. This is a picture taken by Dick Lipsey of the crows. If you look along the upper windows on the left there, you can see crows sitting on the tops of these trees. This is the new balance roost. In this narrow set of trees along the river, this is their roost of choice at the beginning of the winter season. Here again, you can see where they are. Picture on the left is of Mr. Lipsey's again, taken looking with a bit of light in the sky of the pros as they fill the tops of those trees. The picture on the right shows them being coming down almost to the water's edge. Here is another view of Dave Lipsey's there. You can see them how densely they fill in the tree tops. This is a picture of us from up in the cemetery when they chose to roost at the far edge of the cemetery. Here's a tree after dark with the... Notice how the birds are all facing in one direction. They are like a windmill or something of that sort. That shows the direction that wind is coming from. Crows spin up like owls a pellet every two days and pellets were collected and they were analyzed. It's amazing, the first year in 2017 when this was done, the largest volume material was the Asian bittersweet. No wonder that invasive plant spreads so rapidly. There were other pellets with safflower and corn. There were mice, mammals, songbirds. Even one saltmarsh snail, which had to have come probably from Newburyport. And then there were various non-food items. This is Tom French dissecting the pellets he did this. He was at that point with the Mass Fish and Wildlife Group. This is his second analysis, his second year. Again, a lot of seeds this time staggon sumac was more prevalent and various invertebrates and non-food items. Notice that there were small stones and glass in the non-food items. And since they're resting on urban parking lots quite a bit, that's probably not surprising. We have many visitors that have come, hundreds of visitors over the past few years who have enjoyed coming to see the crows. And Will Basad, who's now in Brunswick, I believe the young man on the right. I'm not sure where he's on the call tonight, but I know he has moved to Maine since that picture was taken. One of the things I wanted to point out is that crows are allowed to be hunted in Maine. And there are two periods, February to April and August to September. There's no limits. And crows, the only species that seems to be hunted purely for the pleasure of killing it. I also have been corresponding with various people in Maine about some of the winter crow roosts. And I'd love more information from any of you who have it about others or more details about these. But Louis Bevier was telling me that they've had up to 15,000 crows in the Waterville roost. And in 2012, they had 10,000 at the CBC. Also in Augusta, there were 10,000 seen in 2019 at the CBC, but none this year or this past year. And the crows just weren't within the roost circle. I'm sorry, the CBC circle. And, but they were seen staging on the ice in Hallowell nearby in January. Now in Portland, I've had Mainers sending me information about those that are staging near the Calvary Cemetery. So again, please let me know more about this. You can see in the map of Maine there that both Waterville and Augusta are along rivers. They love to be along a river. There's a roost in Hadford, Connecticut and Springfield mass along the Connecticut. Ours, as you know, is in along the Merrimack. And often there are birds in Manchester, New Hampshire along the Merrimack. So rivers are great places for roosts. Tonight, I'd like to read you a poem by Mary Panade, Mary's from Boston. It seems that poems are in vogue at this point. So expert town crier, I am great, guard extraordinaire. Nothing but nothing gets by me without note. Sure, rock on tour, I am wise to wall. Ever certain, ever free, glossy, bossy, braggadocio. Is there anything, anything at all? I do not know. And I love this illustration on the left, which was in an article in the New York Times about agriculture, but just seemed to fit my fancy. So we'd love to have you join us next winter at the roost. If you can make it even this year in the next couple of weeks, they're still there. And we certainly wanna thank David Doubleday for inviting us to the York County Audubon for hosting us and to all of you for watching. We are Dana and Bob and we're in nothing over. That's my email. So please let me know if there's anything more that you'd like to know. I turn it back to Bill and Nick. Good, I'm actually not sure if Bill is back. Okay, good, I didn't know if he made it back on. So Bill, I'll let you handle questions. Okay, there I am. Well, thank you very much. That was very interesting. I have a few questions here. We'll start with a critical one, which is how do you count them? With difficulty, but I'm gonna let Bob describe that because that's something that he loves to do. And he's the official counter for this roast. It's a skill that you learn. It's sort of like playing the piano. Anyone can pick away at it, but to get good, you have to practice a lot and have some technique. I was taught by a person by the name of Ludlow Griscombe who was a professor at Harvard when I was there and I was head of the undergrad bird club. So we taught the whole group how to do it. What you do is learn to count by numbers. So let's assume you had a hundred dots on a piece of paper, you would look at it quickly and say there's five together and then there's another five and a third five. So it's sort of like cutting out groups of five and you go through the flock quickly and see how many groups of five you get. And then you maybe increase it to tens and you can eventually get up to 25s. The higher you get though is the greater your chance of error but nonetheless, as you practice, now a hundred dots on a page is not any problem. You turn the page, you look at the page for four seconds and have to count it. But when you get four or 5,000 dots, let's call them crow sitting in some trees or on a barn or on the ice somewhere, it's a lot harder to do. And so you have to develop this skill so you can do it and do it fairly rapidly because they don't give you, if they're flying by you, you have to be at the same speed they are or you miss them. And using a clicker is a good way to do it. And you don't have to remember 100 or 1,000 number you're onto, you just click it along and keep your concentration. It is a concentrated thing, anyone can learn it. I've taught it to people that I didn't think until one bird from another and it works but it's simply that kind of a skill. I'm willing to teach anybody about it or show them how to do it in more detail if you're interested. I was talking to Brian Harrington who is the red knot man from Manimat. And he was saying that he uses something like a app called wildlife counting and when he is going out with his people to count shorebirds, they often practice with that to try and hone in their skills to improve on the accuracy of doing it. I might add a post script to that. The way I like to check is to find another counter. You know who these people, they're scattered around everywhere and I'd like to count and have them count side by side. And then one of us says, oh, we write down what we got for a count. If you are in that league, you are going to be probably within 4% of each other and somewhere between your 4% is probably the actual number. So that's the way you go. So when we count, we do that. We don't take someone that has another one has a thousand and a hundred and say, well, we'll compromise on 500. That's not counting. That isn't even estimated. That's foolishness. People do it, but it doesn't tell people what it is. You've got to do it with people. You can practice with people. Frankly, it's good. It's a good thing to do and it's a fun thing when you learn how. And about how many minutes does it take to scan the roost and come up with your count? Well, that's the thing, Bill. The roost is remember when it's dark. Yeah. So most of the counting of any crows in a winter situation is done, in my opinion, during the staging. And often the crows roost in an obscure situation where you may not be able to see them. In Lawrence, you have some ambient light from some of the buildings in that to give you a little bit of help, but and what we discovered this year, much to our surprise is that the birds also move into the roost very slowly. I don't know of anyone who has actually counted the roost, you know, every 10 minutes, every hour or whatever and tried to find out what the pattern is of crows entering a roost on a particular evening. But they don't enter it, we discovered all at once. And so you have to be there over a period of time in order to get any true from the roosting part of it. We've been counting them as they're going into the final stage. One of the slides that didn't come up there, it skipped it on mine was the numbers we've seen over the past few years. And as it turns out, we found that as they move up the river over the bridge, you can count them if you're working well at it and experience in counting in this river of birds that come over you. But that's in a staging. They were moving from their main staging area to the final staging area. And in one time, that was taken by a guy we call Bob and Bob took those pictures one night. He was out counting with me another night. He is a good counter and we counted up and I said, well, how many you have? And he said, well, you know, 20,000, maybe a few birds more. And I said, I'm at 21, 20,200. That's what you get when you get good counting. He's talking about the video from the garage roof that I showed. Okay, I have another question. Do American crows and fish crows, are they known to interbreed at all? Not that I know of. Not that I know of. They're directly quite separate. And do crows have regional differences? One questioner asked about, referred to a book by Jennifer Ackerman about the intelligence of birds and wondered whether New England crows are different in any way from crows elsewhere in the country. I know that the famous story by Professor Masloff of University of Washington in Seattle where he was going to do an experiment on the crows on the campus. And they decided to put a mask, it was a Neanderthal man's mask on the researchers that were going out to capture these crows and do something to them. And John Masloff has told me that generations later those crows are still passing on to their young. The information that anyone that looks like this Neanderthal man, in fact, if you put that mask on you will still be absolutely harassed by the crows on that campus, although that was years and years ago now. So crows have a very, very strong memory. There's a story of hunters in the Midwest who would go into a blind as a group. The crows supposedly could count as the crows, the hunters left there and they wouldn't go back there till all the counters had left. I'm not sure what that's apocryphal, but I do know that a story from June Aga Chamberlain who was a crow researcher on Cape Cod said that they knew her appearance, they knew her car and they would respond accordingly depending upon what they had done. Bob and I are, or I am certainly hyper cautious. I want to observe the birds, not disturb the birds. So as often as I can, I won't even get out of the car. They probably know our car. They say, here they come again, but we try to observe them and not change their behavior because we were there. I have one example. You talked about intelligence of the birds, in extent, and what they would do, the Masalophic experiment could happen here or anywhere, but there's a crow species in New Caledonia that it sort of put intelligence ahead. It can design tools, it can take a stick, sharpen it or pick the right stick and use the stick to dig it a hole and bring out food and this sort of thing. And so some of the crows are that intelligent. Most of them are not, but I still think they're smarter than we are because they can keep doing a lot of things that we can't figure out about them. Right. A question that might be of concern to people in Lawrence is what volume of excrement, for lack of a better term, is produced by the roost each night? Does it, is a cleanup required? Well, you remember that picture of new balance and the trees along the river? When they're in that roost, all is well because they are in a narrow set of trees along the river and there's no one living there or going there almost on a daily basis. So that area, they are not bothering the citizens. And fortunately, last winter, they were suddenly, they were disturbed, I believe, by people who were out on the bridge near the new balance roost on November 3rd. And they suddenly left there. And until the 19th, they were just all around. They were on the ground. They just couldn't seem to settle in, but they weren't gonna go back into that roost because there had been people with tripods and long big cameras and they were on the bridge for hours. And I think the crows equated those people with hunters and they've had such a persecution from hunting that they never went into the roost again that winter. A few weeks ago, we had a couple of birders wanting to see the things. And so the four of us got under one of the stagings which moved out and it was in a whole group of trees. And that was nice. You could look up and get appreciated. And that was good until we stopped and went away. I had about 40 droppings on my car. I had three or four on my clothes. We had to wash everything we had on because we were standing out and washing them. Yes, and you don't stand under a flock of crows. But once they had moved, last winter when they took that unusual move early, they moved to an area where there was no housing, no people. And in the other two years, they have moved around every night. So they haven't created a real harassment. And the Department of Agriculture has the legal authority to kill them if not harass them. And so that is not a good thing if they are using the same roost within a urban area. I know the city of Gloucester two years ago brought in the Department of Agriculture to harass them. And I don't know whether they even have a roost there anymore. Well, I'll wrap up with one final question, which is, could you relate the most amusing or interesting anecdote you can think of in your observation of crows? All right. Okay, it's a funny one. It was a time like now when snow was plowed up a lot and there was an area in the parking lot along the river with it was a parking. So it was well lit up, which made it rather interesting. And I was looking at that and there was, it was quite late, the crows should have been in their roost or staging somewhere, but these were standing around a dozen crows and they would get to the top of the snow pile. And I thought, well, what's next? They slid down it. And I thought, well, that was an accident. They slipped. They walked around and went up and slid down it again. They were a bunch of kids thoroughly enjoying sliding down this probably six feet of snow and then walking around and trying it again. I think the most embarrassing was that story I related about telling someone, I was going to show him 10,000 crows sitting on the ice and there wasn't one, but yeah. So if there's anything that anyone asked you for Bill, please just let us know when we'd be happy to help. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. As everyone can see on the screen, they've put their email address. So if you have questions, you'd like to send them, they'd be happy to try to give you an answer. So thank you again to everyone for joining us tonight. And we hope to see you next month, March 16th. Good night everyone. Thank you Bill. Thanks so much. Thanks Nick. It was fun.