Constable: Smart crows' rehabilitation not yet caws for celebration
In recent years, I've spotted coyotes and foxes in the local park, an 8-point buck and a doe in the 7-Eleven parking lot, and a plethora of squirrels and rabbits, as well as the occasional opossum, raccoon or hawk, in our backyard. But the smartest creature in the suburban landscape hasn't graced our neighborhood in more than a decade.
The common crow is still struggling to rebuild its suburban population, says Denis Kania, president of the DuPage Birding Club, former manager of natural areas for the St. Charles Park District and a frequent teacher of ecology and bird-related classes at Morton Arboretum. Our once-thriving suburban crow population took a severe hit from West Nile virus, which was first reported in Illinois when two dead crows were found in September 2001.
One of the reasons the disease spread so quickly among crows is because they "have a social hierarchy many other birds do not," Kania says.
West Nile spread widely and wiped out multiple generations because crows roost together with a complex social system that includes nurturing parents, hardworking offspring and a true family atmosphere. Crows look after each other.
"In many ways, they are ahead of us," Kania says.
Not only that, but crows might be better than I am when it comes to assembling a shelving unit from Ikea.
Crows routinely bend pliable twigs into hooks to gather food in the wild, which is something apes can do. But crows also can build compound tools, according to a story in Scientific Reports. The wild crows caught for that experiment pieced together several shorter metal sticks to assemble a tool long enough to reach into a cage and pull a food pellet within reach. In another experiment, crows reached a small stick by pulling up a string, and then used that stick to reach a longer stick, which they used to reach the food.
One of my all-time favorite books, "Crows" by local novelist Charles Dickinson, features fantastic fables about crows. The internet is full of stories about crows who are smart, even funny.
"They can do much more complex things," Kania says in comparing crows and other birds in the corvidae family, such as blue jays and magpies, to the rest of the feathered factions. "They are by far at a higher level."
Their populations, sadly, are not. But there is some hope.
"I am now hearing crows in more places," says Kania, who lives in Naperville.
On Super Bowl Sunday, Kania led a birding group onto the grounds at Fermilab in Batavia. "We saw crows in three locations," he says, noting each group featured between three and six birds.
Longtime DuPage Birding Club member Diann Bilderback points to evidence that crows are able to recognize human faces and remember people who treat them well, and those who do not.
Not only do they remember, but they also somehow convey those stories to other crows. Kania says crows apparently recognized his group during one outing to find a great horned owl, an enemy of the crow. "The crows knew we'd be flushing out that owl," Kania says, explaining how the crows then mobbed that owl and flew around harassing it.
The crows that used to visit my family's backyard once horrified some folks by killing a nest of baby bunnies in broad daylight. If crows really want to endear themselves to suburbanites these days, they need to build some tool to keep coyotes at bay.