Yeah, a bit. The fledglings who still demand to be fed by their parents are found following the parent around and squawking loudly. This one is an adult and he was just sitting on the branch by himself feeling the breeze.

Get a fake cover for it with the title How to Pretend to Read in Public.

They are territorial, so you can sometimes recognize them based on location and number when there’s nothing else distinguishable about them. There used to be two of them that would claim my front yard as their territory and they’d claim first access to any food that was put out and drive off competitors. They increased in number though and I could tell they had some kids because they did the whole squawking fledgling act where they scream to be fed constantly. So now there are more members of the family that dominate the area.

Different sets will follow me around in different parts of the neighborhood, again reflecting the territorial aspect. There’s one couple a few blocks from my house that is highly distinguishable because one of the birds has a wonky wing. My neighbor named that was Twitch and its mate is Shogun.

Here’s a post featuring them and one of their fledglings: https://lemmy.ml/post/17566746

There’s a crow at my work who hides his treats in a particular patch of grass and so I call him Stash. I’ve seen him drive off other crows who get near his stashes.

I carry cat treats with me since you can carry so many in a small pouch in a pocket. They supposedly like unsalted peanuts in the shell too, but you can’t carry as many on a walk. They still follow me when I run out of treats, so I make sure I carry a lot. They’ve also come up on my porch and eaten wet meaty cat food.

I work at a college campus. Several crows will follow me when I’m walking around since they know I’m a source of snacks. This one was following me from building to building while I was putting up flyers.

Most of the calls in my neighborhood tend to be shorter bursts—territorial or assembly calls. The greater frequency calls tend to be reserved for when a hawk or owl is around and needs to be mobbed once backup arrives. The fact that the similar sounding duck quacking is interspersed seems to indicate imitation to me.

Still pretty common today.

Yeah, I keep whatever non-perishable objects they bring me. So far it’s just the three stones.

I got a few stones from them in the bird bath in my front yard, which was awesome—A red quartz, a white quartz, and a random piece of concrete. Today they left fries in the bird bath, so, you know, thought that counts… Or they were just softening their food up and something interrupted the meal.

US patents expire after 20 years.

I recently read In the Company of Crows and Ravens and the authors mentioned that crows have come to specifically recognize the McDonald’s logo on a bag as a likelier source of food than a plain bag.

I recently read In the Company of Crows and Ravens and it suggested that crow language may be very specific to crow families and neighbors, kind of like a regional dialect but for many very small regions, so it might difficult to interpret a universal language that understands the more specific aspects of every individual crow cant. We might only get the most basic and common calls.

I’m guessing it would be more like, *Hey, Bob, watch this!"

Yeah, that is a pattern I’ve seen. I grew up having to troubleshoot stuff offline just to get a modem on PC to work on dialup to get to a BBS or CompuServe or editing mods for computer games, whereas my Mac friends were mostly playing with artistic programs on Mac. I also used artistic software on PC but that too required more skill. I don’t recall seeing them deal with a command line interface whereas most of my earliest games ran in DOS.

Weird. I was thinking the post was saying Mac kids were less digitally literate because of the whole “it just works” culture. When I ran a help desk, the Mac users were definitely less adept. The pattern seems to continue with iPhone and Android users I encounter today.

!crows@lemmy.ml is a more active alternative for corvid content.

Humboldt is the neighborhood, but I rarely hear anyone use the term. It’s just a part of north Portland or NoPo when we talk about it.

They tend to be up in tall trees around my neighborhood, so the nests are hard to spot. But you can guess where they are because I’ve seen crows get territorial with each other when one flies up to the part of the tree where the other is.

I started out getting their attention by making noises. Once I knew they were aware of me, I tossed the food into a flat area where they could easily collect it all. Once they realize you’re good for food, it won’t take much effort to get their attention. They start looking for you and will fly up when you come outside. I’ve had them swoop very close to me to get my attention if I hadn’t noticed them yet when I’m outside. They’ll also caw to let each other know that you’re there, so more will fly up. Sometimes there’s one that will stay in a tree overhead as a watch if there are cats or other possible dangers in the area.