At daybreak on a spring morning, as many as 30 songbird species — the so-called “dawn chorus” — may greet us with bright, cheerful song as the sun rises.
But on these cool late-autumn mornings, the songbirds are mostly silent.
Now, it’s the highly sociable crow that welcomes us to a new day. In fact, the hoarse cawing of a murder of crows from the nearby woods is the sound I most identify with this time of year. As the late naturalist John Burroughs wrote: “Toward autumn, you hear the crows first, making proclamation in all directions that it is time to be up and doing, and that life is a good thing.”
The cunning, solid black crow is one of the most widespread birds in Georgia and all of North America. Everybody knows crows, and most people have opinions about them, ranging from outright loathing to bemused admiration.
I am an admirer of crows, perhaps the smartest and most adaptable of all our native birds. They are good learners and problem-solvers and benefit humans by eating a variety of injurious pests.
In recent decades, crows, which once were typically rural birds, have begun thriving in cities. Scientists theorize that crows “learned” that urban areas can afford protection from human hunters, which may decimate crow populations.
One reason that crows have been widely hunted is that they can do great agriculture damage, especially to young corn plants. They also rob songbird nests of eggs and babies. In recent years, crows have gotten another black eye as carriers of the deadly West Nile virus.
Crows also have been thought of as representatives of evil.
“If they are not just going into mischief, they are popularly supposed to be just returning from it,” said an 1895 essay in the Wilson Quarterly Bulletin. “Persecuted on every hand for many decades, in the East it is a wonder that the species has not become exterminated.”
With the crow’s knack for overcoming adversity, however, I suspect that the species will be thriving for a long time to come.
In the sky: The moon will be full Saturday night — the "Snow Moon," as the Cherokee peoples called this month's full moon, said David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer. Venus is low in the west just after dark. Mars is low in the southwest at sunset and sets about an hour later. Jupiter rises out of the east a few hours after dark and will appear near the moon Thursday night. Saturn is very low in the east just before dawn.
