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When we first moved to where we live now, I thought there were ducks quacking up in the trees, but they turned out to be fish crows.
YES! I kept wondering why the crows where I moved to sound like they are saying "uh-oh" instead of regular crowing. They are fish crows. Slightly smaller than the American Crow.
I love both crows and ravens. Old traditions in several cultures see them as messengers that travel between our world and the "other".
I feed the ones where I am currently staying in Ontario chicken wieners. They love them. The same family has been coming back each Spring for three or four years now. They take up their spot in a neighbor's birch tree and caw to us.
It is pretty much all ravens where I live (Anchorage, Alaska) and they are very much bigger than the crows I remember growing up in Virginia. These ravens have a pretty broad vocabulary.
That said, my wife and I were in Kodiak, AK where there is a large population of crows. We were walking down the street and heard a cat meowing. At least we thought it was a cat. However, the meowing was coming from above us. Looking up, there was a crow sitting on a power line meowing like a cat!
YES! I kept wondering why the crows where I moved to sound like they are saying "uh-oh" instead of regular crowing. They are fish crows. Slightly smaller than the American Crow.
I love both crows and ravens. Old traditions in several cultures see them as messengers that travel between our world and the "other".
I feed the ones where I am currently staying in Ontario chicken wieners. They love them. The same family has been coming back each Spring for three or four years now. They take up their spot in a neighbor's birch tree and caw to us.
Crows are super intelligent, and I assume ravens must be also. Crows can actually identify human faces and tell one human from another. If you feed them, they learn to recognize you. I had a neighbor once that had trained a neighborhood crow to come when she called his name, and to sit on her hand and shoulder.
Crows are super intelligent, and I assume ravens must be also. Crows can actually identify human faces and tell one human from another. If you feed them, they learn to recognize you. I had a neighbor once that had trained a neighborhood crow to come when she called his name, and to sit on her hand and shoulder.
When I lived in this one house in Seattle years ago, there was this one crow who had a thing against me. I don't know why it didn't like me, but at some point it dive-bombed me a couple times, after which point I threw a stick at it. I might have done that a couple times (don't worry I never hit the bird). For like, 2 or 3 years afterwards, whenever I went out of my house to walk to the supermarket when that particular bird was around, it would follow me for several blocks, dive-bombing me. Got really annoying. And I don't think it did that to any of my roommates, just me.
Ravens and crows are highly intelligent social species, and among their many behaviors is mimicry. It is possible to teach them to mimic human speech. It's not clear how much of it they can understand.
In general, birds are very strange creatures. Their reptilian ancestry gives them characteristics that are really hard for us mammals to understand. There are areas where their intelligence is just hard to believe, and there are areas where they seem really primitive.
They really are. They can also learn to talk. I had the honor of rehabbing one. "He" was extremely smart and surprisingly very clean. His family stuck around and would visit him when I was out of sight. I believe they are born with "imprinted memories" through DNA.
Really? The only ravens I've ever seen have been in Spokane or the Canadian rockies, and in both cases the birds were quite big.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Northrick
It is pretty much all ravens where I live (Anchorage, Alaska) and they are very much bigger than the crows I remember growing up in Virginia. These ravens have a pretty broad vocabulary.
Yup. All through there and through British Columbia, Yukon, North West Territories and Alaska, and on the Pacific coastline and the islands, the ravens can get really huge. Much bigger than the Ravens further south on the continent, some can get almost as big as bald eagles and they have deeper, more raucous voices too with a vast range of sounds.
I love that dripping water in an echoing barrel sound they make that Parnassia mentioned. There is no mistaking that sound for anything but a raven.
They make a clacking noise sometimes that always impresses.
When I moved here 3+yrs ago I started trying to teach them a turkey hen call at the dog park. They never returned the call. Not to say they didn't learn it and chose not to appease me.
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