4 December 04

Crow Duty

The Wildlife Health Center’s crow monitoring project is going quite well; after weeks of catching none, my colleagues have now caught a total of ten crows (almost all juveniles) and three yellow-billed magpies. Two of the crows managed to ditch their transmitters, somehow, and the third is completely missing, but the remainder are tracked daily.

Numenius has a small ham radio, so we often turn it on in the morning when there are foraging crows on the field to see who’s out there. (It’s usually crow # 594.) But to get them all, we need to go over to the University Mall at nightfall, where an impressive nightly roost yields lots of radio signals and an awful lot more guano. (BAD place to park overnight.)

This evening we volunteered to check, and heard crows #333, 594, 473, 454, 194, 113, and 652. Five minutes of work. This time last year, folks, I was writing articles about nonresident tuition. Now I count crows on Saturday evenings…

Posted by at 07:42 PM in Nature and Place | Link |
  1. Crow 594’s neurons happen to be wired so that every time his transmitter gets a signal from your ham radio, he gets a little massage right where his leg aches. The ache, of course, is from that time he and his (former) buddies tried to pull an entire inflatable Bart Simpson out of a dumpster.

    So he won’t go far. And you’ll notice he doesn’t like yellow as much now.


    — Jarrett    4. December 2004, 22:42    Link
  2. Hmm, I don’t know: maybe it’s not such a big leap from writing articles about nonresident tuition to counting crows. Learning as I am about how smart crows can be, it seems to me that their roosting at the Mall could have had something to do with picking up a few signals about how to change their status…

    — maria    5. December 2004, 08:38    Link
  3. So are you and your co-workers sick of Counting Crows” jokes yet?

    — Chris Clarke    5. December 2004, 08:49    Link
  4. Seems like SUCH a promotion, I recall those days! Aren’t you happy?

    Outsmarting the transmitters seems utterly crow-like. Why doesn’t anyone broadcast the Bird Brain of Britain trials here? Crows are always at the top, the Border Collies of the bird world.

    — Nicole    6. December 2004, 16:42    Link
  5. I have to ask: are the crows affected in any way by carrying a radio on them? more prone to headaches, tumours etc?

    — Coup de Vent    7. December 2004, 10:24    Link

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