Crow Roost Video

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What: This is a follow up on the posting from over the weekend. Zac caught a couple of shots of the roost when it was over by the cemetery on Archibald about 3 weeks ago. The rest I took last Friday while hunting them down. On the previous post, I included a map that you can use to see where we were for the different shots.

Ecological notes: The crows are still jumpy in selecting their nightly roosts and it's been hard to keep track of where exactly they are each evening, but they seem to be preferring the Intervale for one of their last staging areas before flying south to their nightly roost. It's an exciting safari everytime I try and follow them in the evenings.

Lots of speculation here, but it seems the main reasons for roosting behavior in crows seem to be:

• predator avoidance
• huddling for warmth
• flirtation (finding mates for the nesting season)
• storytelling
• being social

Where: Burlington (and other urban areas)

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