Why herons and crows are enemies

Is that where the saying "to eat crow" comes from? I have always been interested in how crows taste for a couple of reasons. One is because of the old adage "to eat crow," meaning to do something distasteful like admit being wrong , which suggests that crows taste bad.

The etymology of a saying like "To eat crow" is often hard to trace. Often you will find answers that sound good, but are simply constructed stories made far after the fact to explain something unusual.

My father was good at these stories; usually they involved "Sam" something-or-other. I have been made aware of the following reports of the origin of "To eat crow" from a couple of web sites:. Etymology - The term's origin has been lost, although a story relates that it involved a War of encounter in which a British officer made an American soldier eat part of a crow he had shot in British territory.

Whether or not it is true, the fact remains that crow meat tastes terrible. From "Food for Thought" by James R. It's one of our domestic dishes from a recipe allegedly discovered during the War of A Brit had caught an American shooting a crow on the wrong side of the border.

He talked the Yank into handing over his gun, then used it to force the fellow to take a big bite out of the crow and swallow it. Needless to say, once the American had his gun back, he forced the Brit to eat the rest of the bird. I actually do not believe this story is the real origin of the saying.

It just sounds too pat and too contrived. Also, I find it difficult to believe that a single incident between unknown and relatively unnoteworthy individuals would make its way so pervasively into the general lexicon. Besides, which of these guys would spread this tale around? Neither one would want to talk about it, I imagine!

Note that both accounts mention that crows taste bad, an unproven assumption. I have seen two references to the edibility of crows in the technical ornithological literature I'll have to look the references up; I don't have them on the top of my head , and they are widely divergent.

One says that they are foul not fowl and not worth eating. Another says that they taste just fine, as good as any other dark-meated bird. I have had several opportunities to sample the flesh of crows I will not go into detail about how this came about, but remember this is a legally hunted species. In my opinion, crow tastes just fine.

It is similar to wild duck or any other wild bird with very dark meat. Crows have no white meat on them, as is true for most birds.

Whenever someone says something "tastes like chicken" remember that they're talking about the DARK meat of chicken, not the white. The meat of most wild birds is even darker than the dark meat of chicken, and will have a gamy smell and flavor to a varying extent. New York and most states with hunting seasons set no daily bag limit on crows. Most literature on hunting them tells the hunters to be considerate to the property owner and collect the crows into one big pile instead of leaving them scattered over the field.

A few mention that crows are edible and give some recipes for cooking them. I think if I knew people were eating the crows, crow hunting would feel more acceptable and less like vandalism. Most birds that eat indigestible foods produce pellets. I know for a fact that crows and jays at least Blue and Florida Scrub- produce pellets, and I am certain that most other insectivorous birds do as well.

I'm not sure why all we know about are owl pellets. Perhaps it's because they roost in recognizable spots and produce large, cohesive pellets with lots of hair to hold them together. If anyone would bother to look under a crow roost they would find hundreds of small lumps of grain and gravel that represent the crows' pellets.

Not having much hair in them, they fall apart quickly and might be overlooked if you didn't know what to look for. In the winter of I was exploring under a medium to large crow roost in central Ohio somewhere between 14,, and was surprised at the amount of gravel that was moved. Take about 5 small stones each about 2 mm in diameter , figure a pellet every other day over the course of 5 months, and multiply by 50,, and you come up with a significant amount of material moved!

I figure, at a conservative 0. I have never seen a male American Crow incubate, and I have not heard of any truly convincing cases of males incubating. My colleague Dr. Carolee Caffrey has spent hundreds of hours watching nests of marked crows in California, and she also has never seen anyone but the breeding female incubate.

Female-only incubation is typical of the family Corvidae. Only females get brood patches, the defeathered, highly vascularized patches on the belly and chest that are in contact with the eggs. Any report of males incubating needs detailed verification. The reports of shared incubation in popular reference sources like Harrison's bird nest book appear to be repeated quotes from the same source: Bent's life histories, quoting Bendire.

I have read Bendire , Life histories of North American birds and he gives absolutely no details. But you know what they say, that if something is repeated often enough it becomes fact.

I have made a couple of observations that might explain some reports of male incubation. Helping females sometimes try to incubate. When the breeding female is off the nest these younger birds will slip in and sit on the eggs or nestlings. They usually look nervous, constantly looking around, and always leave very quickly when they see another crow approaching.

Unlike the incubating female, they are never fed on the nest and are often chased away. A second instance is when the breeding male comes and feeds the incubating female. Often the female will leave the nest for a while.

The male usually remains nearby to guard the nest. Most frequently he will perch near the nest or even on the edge of it. Very infrequently he will actually step down into the nest and stand in it. I find that male Fish Crows do this rather regularly. These males do not, however, actually incubate. That is, they do not put their bodies in contact with the eggs and transfer heat. Crows are very social species and live in large extended family groups. That does not mean, however, that they are friendly with all other crows.

Just as we humans are social and love our families and friends, we also have been known to fight and kill each other on occasion. Birds may fight for a number of reasons, such as defending territory boundaries, protecting their mate or sexual access to them , or defending some other resource. Crow fights within a family are usually short and involve only a few pecks. Crows, in my experience, actually seem to have very few intra-family squabbles compared to some bird species.

Fights between members of different families, however, can be protracted and deadly. I frequently see crows locked together tumbling out of trees in the spring. Although I have never witnessed an actual killing, I would not be at all surprised to see crows kill another crow from outside the family group that was trespassing. Another possible explanation of extreme violence is that the attacked crow was already injured.

Injured, sick, or oddly acting birds are often attacked by their own species. Crows are no exception. One explanation for this behavior is that having an injured individual around is dangerous to others in that it might attract predators.

Not only that, but a vulnerable crow could teach a predator to hunt for crows, which might endanger other crows. With this line of reasoning, crows would be best served by getting rid of an odd ball. I do not know if crows would eat another crow they killed.

They might, but I rather expect they would not. More or less. In general, it appears that they do. Unless a mate is killed or severely incapacitated, crows appear to stay with the same mate year after year. It is possible, however, for exceptions to occur. Generally this would happen in the case of a young pair of birds that mated but bred unsuccessfully. They might break the pair bond and try again with someone else. I had one young male return home after an unsuccessful first nesting attempt.

Because the female was unmarked I do not know if she died or also went home to her folks. Click here to find out more. We have a pair of crows in our backyard that use our bird bath as a depository for all of the carcasses they find. Crows and all members of the family Corvidae will store excess food. Sometimes you can see crows bury things in the grass of the yard usually covering it up with a leaf or plucked grass; sometimes looking at it several times and using a number of different coverings before being satisfied that it really is hidden.

They also hide food in trees or rain gutters, or whatever is a handy spot. At this time of the year April crows are nesting, and the female breeder sits all day on the eggs or young nestlings.

She leaves the nest only infrequently and the male and the helpers bring her food. Food is easy to bring all pecked into pieces and stashed in the throat under the tongue , but water is harder. So, crows often will dunk dry foods in water and take the moistened food to the nest. It is likely that that is what is going on in the birdbath.

In my experience with several captive crows, some individual crows also seem more inclined to put food in water and leave it there than others. Perhaps they want it to rot a little to improve the flavor a bit before they eat it just like we do when we "age" beef.

Since the crows came we don't have any little birds around anymore! Crows are predators and scavengers, and will eat anything they can subdue. That said, the bulk of their diet in this area, anyway consists of waste grain in winter, and earthworms and other terrestrial invertebrates in the spring and summer. Crows will eat eggs and nestlings of songbirds, and in some areas might have a significant impact of a local population of birds. A number of studies have been done, removing crows and looking at the resulting nest success of birds the crows depredated, that illustrate this point.

Removal of crows does NOT increase nest success or survival of the bird to be protected. Nearly always some other predator steps up to eat the same number of eggs and young birds, or they die for other reasons. This idea of compensatory mortality is a very difficult one for people to believe. It is not intuitive.

In fact, the world does not act this way. I like to use the analogy of handicapped parking spaces at the mall You drive up to the mall, looking for a parking space in a crowded lot. You can't find a parking space, but there are four near the entrance that are reserved for handicapped permits only.

You complain and think that if only those handicapped restrictions weren't there, you could park in those spots common sense. In truth, of course, if those spaces were not reserved they would have been taken long ago, just like all the other spaces in the lot. So if one more egg hatches, that will be one more nestling that gets eaten by a raccoon. Or if one more nestling makes it out of the nest, that's one more fledging for the local Cooper's Hawk to eat. Or, if one more young bird survives to fly to South America, that's one more bird that falls into the ocean during the bad storm dying instead of And so on and so on.

This concept of compensatory mortality is vital to the idea of game management. What it says to the managers is that it doesn't matter to the population if hunters take a bunch of young that were slated to die anyway.

If you keep your take within the limits of the mortality that normally occurs, exactly NOTHING happens to the overall population, even if you kill a million individuals like the million Mallards that are killed in the US every year.

And it works! Of course, if you exceed the normal mortality things go awry. Or if the sources of mortality increase in an unusual way huge losses in habitat, for instance, or total loss of food supply at a staging ground then bad things happen. But the normal fluctuations of a stable community just absorb the small perturbations.

So, although you might see a crow eating a baby robin, that is not bad. MOST baby robins die before reaching adulthood. That's why the robins nest so many times during the summer. The presence of crows in an area will not mean all the robins and cardinals will disappear. In fact, despite a slight but significant increase in American Crow populations in North America since the mid's, American Robin populations have increased nearly identically to crows and those of Northern Cardinals have stayed steady North American Breeding Bird Survey data.

The only species of bird that is decreasing in North America in which I MIGHT be convinced crows play a significant part is Common Nighthawk, and that only in urban areas and as yet this is all speculation. Urban nighthawks have such a specialized nest site selection flat gravel roofs that crows might be able to figure them out and find most of the nests in an area. In summary, crows are NOT a problem to most songbird populations, especially not those that are likely to be found around people's houses.

When crows move in, the other birds don't leave. I try to encourage people to enjoy the crows as well as the other birds. Crows are fascinating animals in their own right. I happen to think they are aesthetically pleasing to look at too. Granted, they are not brightly colored, they get up too early in the morning, and they are loud.

No other bird in our area, however, has such a human-like personality and social system as the American Crow. Please see the other information on my web pages about their family lives. Try to get people to understand that it is not a "gang" of crows in their backyard, but a family.

Good luck! Once crows have decided to come to your yard, it might be hard to convince them to leave. Plastic owl decoys will work, A dog could be more effective, especially if it was encouraged to chase them. If, however, something really special was attracting the crows to the yard like readily available food , the crows probably would figure a way how to get it and avoid the dog. The idea is to make the yard an unattractive place for the crows.

Cut down your trees if you have to. Chase them when possible and make it obvious that you are after THEM, not just going out in the yard for other reasons it will make a difference, trust me, but see below for the associated risks of this technique.

Killing the crows is not a recommended option. It can be done legally only in a few areas out of the city, and with permits or a hunting license. But, if one family of crows found your yard desirable, chances are others will too. Crow society is filled with excess crows that are waiting for an opportunity to breed the helpers staying home and helping the parents raise young. If you kill some territory holders off, you just create a breeding opportunity for the crows waiting in the wings.

A far better solution is to work on your own attitudes, not the crows'. Pests are like weeds: their status relies entirely on your point of view and state of mind.

What is a weed to one person is a beautiful flower to another. Birds as small as sparrows, along with larger birds such as crows and ravens, may actively mob raptors. At times, even raptors may exhibit this behavior, as in the case of the Peregrine Falcon in the photo above. The attacking bird typically does this in an attempt to drive away birds, and sometimes mammals, that they perceive as dangerous.

Mobbing can happen any time of the year, but is especially common in the spring and early summer — the breeding season.

At times, however, birds may even defend a non-breeding home range. This may be an effort to protect themselves, as well as their food source. Though common targets are falcons, hawks, ravens, eagles, and owls, any larger bird such as herons may be mobbed. I have observed groups of small birds attacking Turkey Vultures, even though they are a bird that would not prey on eggs or chicks.

There are different types of mobbing. In some cases you may observe only one smaller bird trying to chase the offending bird out of their territory. Once the larger bird flees, the chase is over. Some birds, such as red-winged black birds will chase almost anything, including birds smaller than themselves and mammals. I myself was continually harassed by a male red-winged black bird whenever I passed by its spring territory. In some cases what has begun as one or two birds mobbing becomes a group of birds.

Calling out a warning, the mobbing birds may attract other birds to join forces. These attacking birds may include birds from other species. Herons might not appear to provide crows with obvious competition but crows will fish at the water edge for fish, newts, frogs, etc. Toads have been exploding by the hundred in Germany because they are being attacked by crows, a veterinary surgeon said today. Animal welfare workers and veterinarians had reported that as many as 1, toads had swelled to bursting point and exploded in recent days, propelling their entrails up to a metre into the air.

Now a veterinary surgeon, Frank Mutschmann, who has examined the remains of the toads, said they had been pierced with a single peck by crows trying to eat their livers.

This in turn caused the toads to explode. Herons will often take eggs or small chicks from nests when the opportunatey arises. So crows will harry them to move them out of the colonies territory. Interesting enough while they will also attack birds of prey, some colonies will tolerate a single buzzards nest in their territory, as it will keep most other birds of prey out of the territory.

Basically then, crows are just rock hard and will hassle most birds? I quite like Herons even though I have a pond. They do look pretty good in flight. Crows must be the avian version of a cage fighter then. Crows will mob other Corvids, too. They see the ravens as a predator, just like raptors. With some justification, ravens are very intelligent, and will eat anything, real opportunists.

Big buggers, too! The worst part about it is that after crows have scared off a crane, they do go on about it for ages.