Episode Transcript
Olivia Allen-Value: Bay Curious in your feed on a Monday? It’s true. We’re dropping two episodes every week for some time — and experimenting with some new issues alongside the best way. Tell us what you suppose! Our electronic mail is baycurious@kqed.org.
Now on to the episode…
Sounds of crows
Chances are high good, that could be a acquainted sound.
Crow sounds
These can be “Corvus brachyrhynchos” aka crows.
Our usually undesirable city neighbors. Crows are regarded as loud, pesky, aggressive — even sinister. It doesn’t matter what you consider them, they’re arduous to not discover. They actually demand our consideration.
I’m Olivia Allen-Value. That is Bay Curious and not too long ago a number of listeners have written to us observing there’s a “crow-maggedon” taking place in downtown Oakland and San Francisco. Listeners are seeing big flocks of crows flying throughout the sky round sundown, congregating in the identical places evening after evening after evening.
Glenn Phillips: It is a seasonal phenomenon that crows collect in massive roosts throughout the winter.
Olivia Allen-Value: Glenn Phillips is the chief director of the Golden Gate Hen Alliance. They rely the crows each winter. The newest rely occurred in December 2025 and in Oakland and San Francisco, the crow inhabitants principally doubled from the yr earlier than.
Glenn Phillips: One motive for roosting in massive numbers is that there’s security in numbers. Any predator that might be eager to take out a crow is gonna must cope with not only one crow however hundreds.
Olivia Allen-Value: But in addition, crows are social animals. They share details about the place to search out meals after they collect to sleep at evening. And so they definitely have some favourite locations to sleep.
They’re in search of good locations to perch, with views of predators, shelter from wind and rain…
A spot they’ll let their metaphorical hair down – or, in a crow’s world, let their claws tighten.
Glenn Phillips: If you calm down your hand, it’s free. When a hen relaxes its claw, it’s agency and tight. In order that they really must actively open their toes as a way to let go of one thing. So after they’re sleeping, they aren’t gonna fall off as a result of that grip is tight.
Olivia Allen-Value: Fairly wild!
In order that solutions a few of your questions on crows. However for the remainder of right this moment’s episode we’ll deal with this one despatched in from San Mateo listener Kevin Department in 2019.
Kevin Department: There are such a lot of crows round these days. Are they pushing out the outdated regular birds that I grew up with — the bluejays, the mockingbirds, the redwing blackbird — the birds I used to develop up listening to within the morning.
Olivia Allen-Value: Kevin additionally wished to know if there is a plan to, ahem, cut back their populations. We requested KQED’s Dan Brekke, who has a fascination with nearly the whole lot together with the pure world, to take a stab at answering them.
So Dan, what have you ever received for us?
Dan Brekke: Let’s simply say Kevin isn’t imagining issues.
Sounds of birds
Dan Brekke: I visited him at work — a theatrical rigging firm down in Redwood Metropolis — and he says it’s the identical factor every single day — crows.
Kevin Department: I see ‘em within the morning, I see ‘em within the afternoon, I see ‘em up in timber, I see ‘em on high of buildings. They’re all over the place. I type of really feel just like the crow has taken over huge time.
Dan Brekke: And after listening to all these crows, Kevin has a fairly good crow caw himself.
Kevin Department: CAW CAW!
Dan Brekke: Kevin’s proper — we’re seeing extra crows lately. What number of extra? The numbers are shocking. I spoke with Bob Lewis, who helps run the Golden Gate Audubon Society’s Annual Christmas Hen Rely.
Bob Lewis: So, I simply took a have a look at the rely right this moment, and beginning with 2000, yr 2000, there have been 167 crows in our circle.
Dan Brekke: That ‘circle’ covers Oakland and a big a part of the East Bay shoreline and hills. Round Christmastime, 300 volunteers canvas the world and tally the birds.
Bob Lewis: It’s the most important rely within the U.S. Truly, it’s the most important rely on this planet.
Dan Brekke: So, we began in 2000 with 167 crows. And since then?
Bob Lewis: In 2002, there have been 250, it went up considerably. In 2005 there have been 400. At 2010, there was over a thousand. 2015 nearly fifteen hundred. And in 2018, there have been nearly twenty-five hundred crows.
Dan Brekke: From 167 crows to 25 hundred in lower than 20 years. That’s fifteen instances as many!
Not all over the place within the Bay Space has seen that type of spike. As an example, South Bay crow populations have fallen within the Christmas Hen Rely during the last decade, apparently due to a spike in West Nile virus that killed most of the birds.
However John Marzluff, a College of Washington wildlife biologist, says the sample of accelerating crow populations is a well-recognized one.
John Marzluff: That’s a standard pattern for lots of corvids throughout the western U.S., for certain.
Dan Brekke: That phrase he mentioned is “corvids.”
That’s a household of birds that features crows and ravens — one other species whose Bay Space inhabitants has soared in current a long time.
Olivia Allen-Value: OK, so we clearly have extra crows, not less than in most components of the Bay Space. Kevin additionally wished to know why?
Dan Brekke: The individuals who watch the birds level to an equation with two main components.
The primary half has to do with the place crows usually are not very welcome. Right here’s Bob Lewis once more.
Bob Lewis: One argument, which can be true, is that crows are sensible birds, and crows have traditionally inhabited the countryside. Farmers put up scarecrows and crows eat corn. However within the nation, crows get shot, too, and crows have maybe found within the cities and cities that it’s a a lot safer place to be.
Sounds of a looking video sneak up
Dan Brekke: That’s sound from one of many many, many crow hunt movies you will discover on-line.
You’ll be able to’t actually blame crows for feeling like they’re not wished on the market within the nation.
Shotgun sound within the clear
Dan Brekke: 100 years in the past this yr an organization within the ammunition business launched a “nationwide crow shoot,” ostensibly to do away with a menace to crops and different birds.
And this wasn’t only a “nation exercise.”
San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park employed a hunter — normally a metropolis cop — to shoot crows and different undesirable animals, like jays and coyotes.
Crow shoot with hunter voices: “Take him,” (laughter) “I believe you hit him that one.”
Dan Brekke: And right here in California, crows are truthful sport in most rural areas from December 1st to the start of April. In 2015, California hunters reported killing about 35,000 crows.
Searching video: Good! There you go!”
Dan Brekke: However unfriendly people are only one issue that has led to extra crows turning into metropolis dwellers.
John Marzluff: I believe it’s type of easy myself. Mainly, we’ve offered extra meals for them. Now, the explanations for that could be extra complicated, as a result of it contains issues like rubbish, like fast-food restaurant waste, like street kill, so there are a number of methods we offer them meals. However that’s the underside line. That’s why they’re extra ample.
Olivia Allen-Value: However haven’t we metropolis dwellers have all the time been fairly messy. Take a look at the large open rubbish dumps that was once on the sting of each huge metropolis. If rubbish is attracting crows — the place have been they earlier than?
John Marzluff: You don’t must have a dump. I imply, I believe truly by way of territoriality and growing the breeding inhabitants, it’s higher to have meals extra uniformly distributed.
Dan Brekke: Our urbanized space is way, a lot bigger than it was once. And we’re offering wealthy, reliable sources of meals — from lawns to leftovers. Extra meals permits crow populations to turn out to be extra dense.
John Marzluff: They solely defend sufficient area that’s essential to get sufficient meals to boost their younger and survive. In order extra meals is out there, they’ll dwell in tighter and tighter quarters and you’ll match extra of them into the place.
Olivia Allen-Value: After we return, we get to the bloody reality. Are these crows killing different birds? Stick with us.
Sponsor break
Olivia Allen-Value: So now we all know that we do have extra crows, and we have now some concepts about why. The subsequent query is: Are they killing different species of birds? Like these songbirds Kevin remembers?
Songbird sounds
Dan Brekke: One of many “crow individuals” I talked to is known as Kaeli Swift, a wildlife scientist who has achieved plenty of analysis on crows.
She mentioned there are restricted cases the place crows — abetted by people, sometimes — can pose an uncommon menace to endangered species like snowy plovers.
Kaeli Swift: However your commonplace suburban yard like L.A. or Seattle or New York or wherever else within the nation — not a lot. Most individuals that contact me feeling like crows wiped away all the birds of their neighborhood — and simply have this notion that when you see a flock of crows it means none of your songbirds aren’t going to breed, that the whole lot is doomed — the science simply doesn’t again that up.
Dan Brekke: So analysis doesn’t present that crows are remorseless killers.
And if there are in reality fewer songbirds than when Kevin grew up, it may very well be for a lot of causes — lack of habitat, these pesky squirrels and even our home cats.
Swift factors to a protracted record of the birds’ profitable qualities.
Kaeli Swift: There’s a number of qualities that I don’t suppose you may assist however discover actually engaging — like their potential to be taught our faces and be fairly excited to see us once you’ve constructed up a constructive relationship with them by feeding them, for instance. They play, so you may watch them play video games, notably the younger birds. And so they’re simply type of charismatic and goofy in the best way {that a} canine with a extremely robust persona is. For me, crows have the identical form of high quality the place when you watch them you simply see them do all these items which are so attention-grabbing that you just simply type of can’t assist falling in love with them when you simply open your self as much as that.
Olivia Allen-Value: They sound like people.
Dan Brekke: Kaeli Swift says lots of our issues with crows could stem from how a lot we share in widespread with them.
Kaeli Swift: They’re intelligent, so that they’re capable of outsmart a number of the methods we attempt to preserve them out of our rubbish or out of our property. They’re social, so they’re actually noisy. They’re protecting dad and mom, to allow them to be aggressive round their infants after they really feel like they’re being a menace.
Dan Brekke: I preserve coming again to this factor John Marzluff mentioned, that it’s vital to recollect crows are “sentient beings,” like us, and that we should be taught to make use of our huge human brains to find and tackle the issues we have now with a rising crow inhabitants.
John Marzluff: I do finish each one in every of my talks about crows with a slide that’s like, ‘OK, these items can get beneath our pores and skin. Why? And what ought to we do?’ And my take-home is that we should always rejoice them for being profitable, and if we have to management them in locations, we have to suppose arduous about it. Like they consider how you can dwell with us, we want to consider how you can dwell with them and give you methods that can have significant results on their populations — not simply kill a bunch of them.
Dan Brekke: Issues like higher managing our waste and being sooner about eradicating roadkill.
Olivia Allen-Value: However principally, it feels like we have to simply be taught to co-exist with crows. And see the nice in them?
Dan Brekke: Precisely. Whereas I used to be doing analysis for this story I got here throughout a poetry assortment about crows.
Olivia Allen-Value: Sounds good. We’ll take heed to a kind of poems on the best way out. However first, thanks — reporter Dan Brekke — on your reporting this week.Dan Brekke: You’re welcome
Olivia Allen-Value: And likewise a giant due to our query asker, Kevin Department.
Kevin Department: Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at KQED.
Olivia Allen-Value: This episode was produced by Amanda Font, Christopher Beale, Katie McMurran, Katrina Schwartz and me, Olivia Allen-Value. Particular thanks this week to Pauline Bartolone.
And now the poem we promised you.
Sasha Khokha reads “Early Morning Crow” by Jim Natal:
Crows don’t have any disgrace. They caw at 6 a.m.,
count on a response from the home windows reflecting
overcast skies, anticipate an echo
to return throughout the canyon, for the bottle
to scrub up on shore, the phone
to ring, the empty half of the mattress to fill.
You can’t throw
a boot at them like sex-struck cartoon cats
yowling backlit by the moon, can not
shoo them like pie-faced pasture cows ruminating
with the depth of low-watt bulbs.
The crows wake you
too early. And there you’re, an overdue
invoice, over-ripe melon, alone together with your ideas sluicing
again by means of the gates you needed to decrease by hand
the evening earlier than, cranking rusty cogs and wheels
so you could possibly get some sleep.
The mattress floods
and also you rise, afloat with black wings unfold
like oil upon the floor, a near-fatality
the chilly nearly received, moist by means of and listening to
a solitary crow that croaks:
Is anyone there?
Is anyone there?
then flies away earlier than you may type
an appropriate reply.
Olivia Allen-Value: Some members of the KQED podcast workforce are represented by The Display Actors Guild, American Federation of Tv and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Native.
I’m Olivia Allen-Value. Have an exquisite week.
