Is this normal?

Well, this is my first post, I am braving the waters! . I filmed this because for the past 3 days there has been a large amount of strange crow/raven behavior in my area. I live in Maryland and still don't understand what is going on with these crows, I have never seen them behave so strangely, and for the past 3 days they have been coming from one direction and heading where I described in the video, but also a lot of cawing all day, flying in circles and just really strange behavior in general.

Gorgeous animals aren't they?

They are definitely not in typical flocking order that's for sure.

Maybe there's typically a food waste dump around the area, but just not that day in particular, and they are caught off guard. They could be freaking out and searching individually yet within the loosely knit flock. That sort of behavior could be expected if a reliable pattern of feeding is thrown off.

Other than that, there has been some major animal die offs, en masse, lately. Magnetic Pole Shift / some other interference or environmental poison who knows.

Congrats on your first thread!

Something like this www.abovetopsecret.com...

At 2:21... I see a what looks like a communication tower in the background.

Anyway to get a better shot of that?

I would like to see what it's transmitting.

I have heard of huge numbers of crow, blackbirds, and ravens congregating in flocks, but they don't normally act erratically like you have described. However, lately i have seen several utube videos with blackbirds also acting strangely. I wonder what is going on.

You would think by now the animal psychics would be coming out of the woodworks with an explanation.

I would expect to see this and much like it in the coming months with all the crazy changes in the electromagnetics occurring. Google Video Brooks Agnew and sort by date. He provides some pretty sound theories with respect it all, even including some HAARP angles. Here is a little excerpt of one of the videos.


Who knew we would all be into bird watching.

It is strange. More than likely its more than one thing that's causing it. Strange how they are all going in every direction there is.

That is very very bizarre behavior for these birds. How widespread is this? Have you noticed it , say , a mile away? Five miles?

I have been noticing for the last week that the ususualy large numbers of blackbirds that fly together around here are not the same, instead they are flying in smaller flocks, and the formation is different too, they would usually fly all in the same direction, up or down they would all fly in syncronicity, they seem more scattered , as though they aren't sure what they are doing (direction or destination?)

Thanks all for your replies, I haven't abandoned the thread lol, Just was really busy today. I remembered something though today while doing errands this evening, when I was little an old native women told me about birds and she said to me:

When you see that even the birds don't understand the planet anymore, is when you know man has crossed the line.

reply to post by Atlantican


lol, yea that could be, the season here is so out of whack with really unseasonably warm days, then extremely abnormally cold days, then mild days, some days go from oddly warm, to cold, to warm all in one day here! I agree they are beautiful

reply to post by 12voltz


Thanks for that link, I saw that thread not to long ago but figured it was an isolated event and not much to look in to but when I saw it in my neck of the woods, well, needless to say it got my attention. I wonder if the birds I filmed and the ones you filmed (if that is your thread), are going to the same place?

reply to post by bluemooone2


Not really sure I would say from what I have been paying attention to maybe 1 or 2 miles, may be more but I have only noticed the ones in my immediate area.

reply to post by ISis12RA12ELohim


I think you have something there lady. Can you be more specific as to what direction they're flying? Are they going North to South? South to North? I think that's crazy how they just kept coming. As if they were all on
a mission. SnF for sure and thank you very much for bringing this forward. Try to let us know about some direction if you will. Much appreciated.

Hello and welcome to ATS. I am fairly new here myself, and I know you'll enjoy it as much as me.

As for your post, I live in eastern Ohio and have posted recently in response to a thread about seeing a huge flock of crows on three separate occasions. I have lived here for close to four years now and have not noticed them in such large numbers prior to this winter. What time of day was your video filmed? If it was an hour or two before dark, then they may have been heading to their roost. But I agree, I've never noticed such large numbers at any time in the past, so it makes me wonder....

I did a quick google search and found the following web page that discusses this very thing:
www.mainebirding.net...

Great first thread. Very odd behavior indeed. Glad you were able to get video of it. We had something very similar occur here a few weeks ago in Atlanta, three times in one week (unfortunately, my camera was in for repair). Something's definitely different this year—whether it's the weather or something more remains to be seen. No one seems to have any real insight—or if they do, they're not saying. Good too keep tracking this kind of thing though Eventually we'll see the real patterns.

P.S. The two times they appeared in my yard (once red-winged blackbirds and once plain old mid-sized crows) the dive-bombed the earth from trees—over and over and over. It was the strangest thing I've ever seen birds do.

I just saw this yesterday (same day you posted the OP). I was amazed. I love crows but lately I haven't seen many in my area at all. Then yesterday about a mile or two from my house I saw a massive amount of them doing just what they are in the vid, but also they were walking around on the ground too. It was in a parking lot of an abandoned building. They were grouping in threes also, like they were buddying up, while others were doing the flying thing and cawing like mad. I stopped my car to watch them a bit. I wish now that I had my camera with me. Just figured I'd add my observations here too.

I hate to be contrary, BUT this is not odd behavior at all. Crows have been congregating in large "roosts" in the fall and winter as long as there have been crows. I live in a northern Canadian town and am able to watch bird and animal behavior most of the time. This doesn't mean that the OP is wrong in her observation, though. Something has been changing, but it's not the behavior of the birds....it's the location of the roosts and the fact that more people are observing them.

Why have these roosts recently moved into cities?

A number of possible explanations exist for the relatively recent influx of roosting crows into urban areas. The birds are not making drastic shifts in behavior; crows have been gathering into winter roosts for as long as there have been crows. We know, for example, from work done in the 1930's by John Emlen at Cornell University that approximately 25,000 crows were gathering in a roost near Auburn, NY in the winter of 1932-33, and that a large roost was present in 1911-12 (Emlen, J. T., Jr., 1938, Midwinter distribution of the American Crow in New York State, Ecology 19: 264-275). The big difference is that they were roosting 3 miles south of town then and are roosting smack in downtown Auburn today. Any increase in size of the roost would be imperceptible, compared to the change of locale.

A couple of things may have worked together to get crows into town (both for nesting and roosting):

1) The 1972 extension of the Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 to cover crows. At this point the hunting of crows became regulated. No longer could anyone anywhere take shots at crows, but had to do so (theoretically) within proscribed guidelines and hunting seasons. It is possible that this change may have resulted in the decrease of shooting pressure on crows, allowing them to become more tolerant of the presence of people.

2) A prohibition on the discharge of firearms within city/village limits. It is conceivable that crows somehow stumbled across the fact that they could not be shot in cities because of local ordinances against shooting in town. So, in fact crows might have somehow figured out that the best thing to do to live with their enemy was to get as close as possible, not stay away. Many crow hunters do most of their hunting along flight lines of crows moving to roost. These flight lines through urban areas are protected, those in rural areas are not.

Once crows overcame the urban barrier, a number of possible advantages could extend to them:

a) Cities are warmer than rural areas. In most places a difference of 5-10 degrees F exists, sometimes referred to as a "heat bubble" over cities. Because roosting is a winter phenomenon, warmer spots could be important.

b) Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) populations should be lower in urban areas. Next to people with guns, Great Horned Owls pose the largest danger to an adult crow. Great Horned Owls take adults as well as nestling crows with great regularity. (That is why crows hate them so much!) Owls probably are regular attendants at crow roosts, as owls wake up as the crows are heading into the roosts, and sleeping crows should be pretty easy picking.

c) Artificial light assist crows in watching for owls. I have noticed that many urban crow roosts are not located in nice dense trees where the crows would have microclimate advantages, such as protection from wind or cold. Rather, the crows perch out on the tips of bare branches of leafless deciduous trees. I was quite surprised by this at first, but then I noticed that many (most?) roosts are located near sources of bright illumination, such as streetlights and parking lot lights, like the lights at the Auburn prison and Syracuse University. It makes sense for crows to like "nightlights" to protect them from their biggest bogeyman, the Great Horned Owl. Crows don't see well at night; owls do. Crows near street light could see approaching owls. Also, if a crow gets scared out of its roost in the middle of the night (presumably by an owl taking crows), in lighted urban areas the crows can see where the predator is, and perhaps more importantly, can see to find another perch. You can imagine that flying blindly into the dark is not something any bird would choose to do. I was surprised at the amount of activity at the Auburn roost well after dark. The crows were still making a lot of noise and even flying from tree to tree. In other roosts I have watched that were in darker locations the crows quieted down rather quickly and no movements between trees were seen shortly after complete darkness.

d) Urban areas provide large trees for roosts. In many places some of the largest trees to be found are in urban areas. Many trees in parks and cemeteries were protected from the severe logging of the end of the last century, and are some of the oldest trees around. These large trees may be especially attractive to crows.


www.birds.cornell.edu...

My own opinion is that as our population grows, we encroach on the sites where these birds congregate to roost and feed; also, with all the hype over the strange bird deaths (and they were strange) , we are all looking to the skies that much more, which I think is a good thing.

S&F for your observations.

What you are seeing may not be that strange.Where I live In western NY.I used to work at the local Zoo which is in a local park.Every year in the fall usually late october or early november there is are large number of crows who gather in that park. Now I'm talking thousands of crows.They make a holy ruckus for about a week and then disappear.It's almost like they get together for a meeting and party then they all go home.Of coarse I don't know that's what you are seeing ,But crows are the most intelligent of birds and are very social.I tried to search for a professor at a college in eastern Ny who has studied crows for more than 30 years ,but was unable to find him ....Sorry.I had thought that he was at a college in Elmira or Ithaca.Good first post and nice video.

reply to post by ISis12RA12ELohim


Well as a fellow MD'r I have to say that this is not at all new for the part of the state I am in. I have witnessed this behavior for many many years. That is not to say that it's not new for your area. I've seen crows do this as well as regular black birds (Not the red wing). Typically it will happen at this time of year or a little later it will also happen in the fall of the year.

Keep up the good work though an keep up posted on any new developments!