The pandemic turned a lot of people into birders, but it was probably using the Merlin app on my phone that piqued my curiosity enough to set the wheels of my brain into motion. That and having visited the Tower of London in 2018 with the family, where the crown jewels were cool but what really entranced me were the domesticated ravens that live on the Tower grounds.
At some point last summer, I learned to listen for the ravens that roost somewhere near our house. I could hear their distinctive groak almost every day. I thought they might even be in our tall pines in the back, but a very good friend who happens to be an ornithologist (you need cool friends like that in your life, don’t you?) informed me that they actually roost about a kilometer away down the river. Anyway, I heard them regularly, and of course there are always crows around, and over time I learned to distinguish the two. And it was probably an instagram reel or something about corvids recognizing people, and people befriending the local corvids, that finally percolated into a plan late in December.
A girl needs familiars. It was time to befriend the corvids.
I did a bit of idle research, found a fascinating podcast on crow funerals and a great reddit sub. My ornithologist friend loaned me Ravens in Winter, which I’m still slowly working my way through. And I decided that I would start feeding the corvids in the backyard and see how that went. I bought a giant bag of unsalted peanuts in the shell and started leaving them out on the frozen BBQ on the patio, because if you can’t do something half-arsed then why do it at all?
Not surprisingly, not much happened. The peanuts were depleted, but by the look of the chewed up shells around the BBQ, that was the work of the local fat squirrel population. The new challenge became feeding the corvids without feeding the pesky squirrels. I idly considered crow and raven feeder designs to hang from a branch or put on a pole to thwart the squirrels, but with a little bit of snow and a frozen-solid ground I didn’t think I had much to work with until the spring. I did find one of those magnetic screw bowls inherited from my dad’s collection of tools, and slapped that on the BBQ like a food dish, but the crows and ravens seemed reluctant to come that close to the house.
I was really only half engaged with the idea until today. I happened to be in the kitchen when I heard the crows yelling in the back yard. I had put some leftover hardboiled eggs into the magnetized crow feeder/screw holder on the BBQ earlier in the day, so I opened the door, grabbed a handful of peanuts and eggs and yeeted it out into the snow in the yard, promptly scaring the two crows that had been in the yard into the trees. Being very careful to not make a menacing shadow in the window while peering out at them, I had to bite back a whoop of joy when the crows came back and started actually eating the food I had just tossed out onto the snow.
It worked, it worked, it worked! The crows are eating the food I set out for them!
It occurred to me later that afternoon that scattering the eggs and peanuts and bit of bread crust I also threw out into the yard for good measure (yes, I know bread is not ideal for birds, but I was hella excited) would also be feeding the dog who would eventually be let out to do her business in the same yard. So maybe just pitching everything out into the snow is not a sustainable plan, but needs must until the ground thaws and I can jerry-rig some sort of squirrel and dog proof feeder.
But it worked! I fed the crows! Stay tuned for further updates. 🙂