One of the most ubiquitous birds around, the American Crow is a bird often seen from your yard but not often thought of as a “backyard bird” since they rarely come to feeders. Crows are very opportunistic, being both omnivores and scavengers, so they are just as likely to steal a big chunk of suet from your feeders as they are to tear apart a trash bag before it’s picked up. One spectacle to be on the lookout for this time of year is the mass movements of crows going to roost. In the evening, crows will travel from miles around to join a central roosting site where they will sleep for the night, often near developed areas where there are fewer predators around. There is safety in numbers, but these roosts also provide warmth, and some theorize that there is also information sharing going on between the birds. Even if you don’t live near the roost, in the last hour of daylight you can often spot American Crows flying high overhead, all heading in the same direction, where they’ll join other resident crows, also joined by migrants, to form groups by the thousands. These large roosts are only seen in the nonbreeding season, when birds aren’t territorial, so they’ll start to dwindle by March.
Above photo: Crows roosting in Lewiston, photo by Doug Hitchcox
Backyard Bird of the Month is a feature by Maine Audubon created for the Maine Home Garden News, the newsletter of the University of Maine Cooperative Extension: Garden and Yard
