Happy Crowsgiving

October 13, 2025 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 1 Comment

With apologies to readers of my blog who may be wondering where I’ve been for the past few weeks, here is a very short Crowsgiving greeting.

I have been going on many long crow walks, and there is so much news for the crow-verse, it’s hard to know where to start relaying it all.

But for now, on this Canadian Thanksgiving, here is a little round-up of the past week or so with some of the local crows.

One of the most joyful things this year has been the number of crow fledglings making it through their risky first summer — many more than I’ve seen over the past few years. Several youngsters seem to be sticking with Mom and Dad for the fall.

Lucky II is Marvin and Mavis’s fledgling from this spring and seems set to stick around, replacing Lucky I, who stayed with his parents for three years before moving on to start his own family this year. Lucky II is already a forceful personality!

Barry and Beryl, who live on the street with lots of berries, have Baby Berry and Fearless Fred (and his more conservative mate, Florence) have both of their fledglings with them, learning Fred’s fearless ways.

Crow harvest festival has been in full swing, with nuts being hauled out of trees and the road being used as a nutcracker. If dropping their bounty from a height doesn’t work, the crows wait for cars to run over them and then race in to scoop up the fragments — hopefully before the squirrels or other crows get their first.

Now that the nuts are almost all gone, it will be time to move up the street to harvest the berries on the dogwood trees. After that, it will be Persimmon-fest, when the big orange fruit reaches bird-snacking perfection in November. The persimmons are a big favourite with the starlings, but the crows manage to get their share, of course.

I hope your Thanksgiving is sociable and bountiful too!

Lucky II on bin day — the crows’ weekly fun fest!

© junehunterimages, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to junehunterimages with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Summer’s End

September 17, 2024September 17, 2024 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 8 Comments

Never mind the calendar, all that equinox stuff, and the availability or otherwise of pumpkin-spiced lattes: the local crows have decided that fall started this morning.

I could tell things had changed as soon as I left the house. While the leaves are turning colour a bit, and it is noticeably chillier, the change in crow behaviour is the real sign of the seasons turning.

Crow air traffic controllers have taken the day off.

Normally boundary-sensitive crows are trespassing on each others’ turf with abandon.

Large groups of crows gather in trees, cawing madly; not the “look out, it’s an eagle/raven/raccoon” -type cawing but the riotous joie de vivre cawing of the autumn crow.

Crows compete with squirrels for newly fallen nuts.

They chase each other and tumble in the air just for fun.

I’m followed by a crowd of unruly crows, with the boldest brushing past an inch from my head and making the dog nervous.

Definitely fall!

I write about this phenomenon, the rowdy, rollicking, freedom-from-fledglings social season, almost every year. Although most of the crows are still suffering the itchiness and indignity of moulting season, it’s a joyful, somewhat lawless time of year in Crowlandia. The crows even look like pirates!

The parents are finally (mostly) free from the ceaseless demands of the fledglings; those fledglings are now teenagers and full of curiosity and daring-do; the trees are full of berries and nuts and banquet lies around every corner; crow rules of etiquette are optional.

There was a second, concrete and non-crow-related sign of a seasonal shift this morning.

As I stopped for a minute while Geordie did some intense tree sniffing, a man rode by on a bicycle. In the passenger seat was a little girl wearing a pink sequinned top and belting out “Jingle Bells” at the top of her lungs.

Clearly, crows and kids both march to their own seasonal drummers!

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© junehunterimages, 2024. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to junehunterimages with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

The Young & The Restless

October 9, 2022October 9, 2022 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 3 Comments

In the many years I’ve been photographing and following crows I had never actually had one make physical contact — until this week.

It was predictable in two ways.

It’s THAT Time of Year.

I never get close to being dive bombed in nesting season, which you’d think would be the riskiest season of all.
Nope, it’s early fall, when the local crows are giddy with new freedom, that seems to be the most perilous time for me. The adult crows are free of parental responsibility and the young crows are (literally) spreading their wings and testing the limits of what they can get away with.

These crows, the young and the restless, are unbound by the conventions of who’s territory is whose and general good manners.

This is an annual phenomenon and I’ve written about it a few times. (See Corvid Flash Mobs and Autumnal Adjustments.)

My tactics at this time of year include suspending Peanut Diplomacy until the rowdy phase passes. Sometimes I even change my walking route if things are getting too disorderly.

This year’s bonus challenge is …

Dennis the Menace*

Meet Dennis: he is a 2021 fledgling of Pearl and Echo’s. He (or she) has stayed with mom and dad since then. There were no new fledgling this year, so Dennis is a pampered only child.

Above is Pearl, so named because she often reminds me (in a corvid way) of Vermeer’s portrait, Girl With A Pearl Earring.

I wrote about Pearl and her family in my book, City Crow Stories.

Anyway, Dennis the Menace (or possibly Denise the Menice) has always been a little bit cheeky, following me to the end of his family’s territory and often swooping very close — enough for the occasional rush of wind from a wing against my face. While last year he was kind of scrawny and generally stayed close to his parents, this year he seems to be full of boundless confidence.

Perhaps a little too much confidence …

He keeps a close eye on me as I walk by.

Dennis … and a few of his closest friends (none of them being his parents) following me beyond the normal Pearl family territorial boundaries …

I’m used to Dennis swooping after me, wondering where his peanuts are, and I usually turn around in time so that he’ll swerve off to left or right.

Crows, according to crow scientist John Marzluff, won’t fly at you from the front and he recommends affixing fake eyes to the back of your hat if necessary.

A couple of days ago Dennis actually managed to make contact. I think it was the touch of a claw on the back of my head. Very light and no damage done, but it just shows what a determined little character this particular crow is. No meanness on his part, just a spot of over-enthusiasm.

What worried me much more than Dennis was a time when another clever crow, realizing that swooping close to me didn’t faze me, started to try and find my Achilles heel by flying at Geordie from behind. Geordie (my dog) has always been extremely relaxed around crows, but it would only take one crow landing on his back to change all that — forever!!! Luckily he never noticed how close the crow got as I managed to turn around in time to ward off actual contact and we changed walking route for a couple of weeks, just in case.

Back to Dennis. We had a good talk last time I saw him and he hasn’t managed to catch me out over the last few days. I also turn around a lot when I’m in his neighbourhood.

I was recently thinking of taking up my needle felting again to make some new birds, but now I’m wondering if I should first felt myself a couple of large “eyes” for the back of my head!

* when I gave the name Dennis the Menace, I’m thinking (and giving away my age in saying so) about the comic strip, Dennis and Gnasher, from the UK children’s comic, the Beano — very popular in the 50’s.

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© junehunterimages, 2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to junehunterimages with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.