Ed note: Did you know s group of crows is called a “murder” – this is likely due to old superstitions associating crows with death and scavenging. Sure you may know a group of deer is called a herd, or a group of birds is called a flock, but what do call a group of rhinoceroses or porcupines? Click here to find a plethora of animal group names (none are called Interest Groups though).
By Thomas Fuller in the NYT
Photographs by Alana Paterson
Over and over, the crows attacked Lisa Joyce as she ran screaming down a Vancouver street.
They dive bombed, landing on her head and taking off again eight times by Ms. Joyce’s count. With hundreds of people gathered outdoors to watch fireworks that July evening, Ms. Joyce wondered why she had been singled out.
“I’m not a fraidy-cat, I’m not generally nervous of wildlife,” said Ms. Joyce, whose crow encounters grew so frequent this past summer that she changed her commute to work to avoid the birds.
“But it was so relentless,” she said, “and quite terrifying.”
Ms. Joyce is far from alone in fearing the wrath of the crow. CrowTrax, a website started eight years ago by Jim O’Leary, a Vancouver resident, has since received more than 8,000 reports of crow attacks in the leafy city, where crows are relatively abundant. And such encounters stretch well beyond the Pacific Northwest.
A Los Angeles resident, Neil Dave, described crows attacking his house, slamming their beaks against his glass door to the point where he was afraid it would shatter. Jim Ru, an artist in Brunswick, Maine, said crows destroyed the wiper blades of dozens of cars in the parking lot of his senior living apartment complex. Nothing seemed to dissuade them.
Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds. (click on page 2 to continue)