Sunday, January 27, 2013

Crow Roost


What: Zac and I have been talking a lot about the crows and how they seem to be jumping around a lot from night to night. A couple weeks ago we spotted them at the cemetery on Archibald. Thursday night they were sort of heading that direction so I tried tracking them down. Around 4:30pm on Thursday I watched them flying north from Centennial Woods over the McNeil Plant. Below is a map that shows my route (red) compared to the rough route the crows took.

And I was in Troy, NY for a WFA course this weekend. Saturday night I went for a run as the big full moon was cresting over the hills. It was about 4:45pm or so and I wondered if I might see crows in this neck of the woods flocking to their winter roost. Sure enough I spotted one about 3 minutes into my run flying south over the Hudson River. I followed the crow (which soon disappeared into the flock of hundreds of other crows) for about 3 miles, heading south west from downtown Troy into Watervliet. While I did't get far enough to see the final destination, I saw about 3000 crows in total. These bigger and bigger roosts are an urban phenomenon. In a couple of days I'll post a video of the crows and explain a bit more about why they roost.


View crows in a larger map

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