Crow Commute: Entry to SMaP#145

Once or twice a week I am up and outside early enough to experience “crow time” when drifts of crows flap their way over our garden heading east. They always come in the peaceful dawn light and mostly in pairs or as a threesome, but sometimes up to a dozen. They do occasionally visit the garden to harry nesting myna birds or take a crow's share of my food offerings to our wildlife but during crow time they are just traveling passed.

These are large-billed crows, Corvus macrorhynchos, common in Thailand.

Another crow time comes in the 30 minutes before dusk as they head back west. With binoculars I can follow their commute for about a kilometre before their specks become indiscernible.

Wanting to know where they roost, I followed them on my bicycle one evening but only reached about two kilometres through the town before the trail fizzled out in the dying light.

My intention was to pick up their route again on a later day but after seeing them from other parts of the town I realised that this was more than the small, local roost of dozens of birds that I had imagined. I abandoned the bicycle and took the car. Over the next week I zig-zagged around getting lost down back-lanes but edging closer and closer to where they were going. I suspected a row of pylons but was wrong, then a coconut plantation, nope.

The striking thing was that as I got closer the crows became less obvious. Over our house they were flying at about twice the height of the palm trees but near their roost they kept lower. I could usually hear them, often from several directions at once, but I could not always see any. They also did not fly directly to the roost. As they got closer they took their time, stopping for a while in the trees over a wide area. Perhaps waiting for the light to fade before settling, whilst also taking the chance to catch up with each other. The air was often dense with their caws.

Finally I found the roost in rough, marshy grazing land with lots of sugarpalm trees around. The aerial view on GoogleEarth shows coarse, uneven textures as a much more natural-looking mosaic than any of the dull surrounding agricultural land. I could understand why the crows liked it.

The following evening I explored it properly, arriving early and walking around the rough track that skirts the area. The lovely harsh caws of the crows were a constant soundtrack and I lingered for half an hour at the closest point, watching as more and more flocks worked their way from tree to tree.

Occasionally a tree would burst into life as the thirty or more crows it held all took flight, circled around a few times then fell back to the trees. It wasn’t spectacular because the majority were always well concealed. This was not like a spell-binding murmuration of starlings, it was more subtle. I felt like an outsider with many eyes watching me, an intruder unable to quite grasp the full scale of what I was looking at. It was, however, definitely a privilege to be there, getting a glimpse into their private world.

A composite of video frames:

What I witnessed was not really even at the heart of the roost and I struggle to estimate how many crows there were. On the way out a herdsman collecting his cattle for the night pointed out the trees a couple of hundred meters away where most of the birds were. A very rough guess would be 2-3,000.

A morning visit hinted at the social side to the roost, with telegraph lines used as a meeting place for large groups who paused in their commute to dawdle and croak together as if discussing where to go today.

I then tried to get a better feel for where the morning commute over our house was heading. In a direct line the roost is 12.5 kilometres from our house, which is 10.5 kilometres from the coast. They could easily reach the sea if they wanted but they were hard to track as they spread further and further apart so the best I could do was be sure that some travel at least 17 kilometres.

I also found other places that the crows habitually check as they disperse from the roost, such as a secluded cowshed where 30 took off as I cycled passed - I have no idea what they found in there - and a roadside where too many leftovers are daily dumped for the street dogs.

On several days I counted how many crows flew over our garden during crow times and the numbers were never close to being the same. Sometimes only 8, sometimes over 50. I guess some days the best carrion will put our house in a line with the roost, sometimes not.

Months later I revisited the roost again and my immediate impression was that there were more crows lurking amongst the wider landscape’s trees than last time. The noise was also louder. Some trees outside the roosting area had twenty or more birds in them all busy talking to their neighbours. I'm sure they could tell that I was not one of the usual herdsmen of the area and I may well have been a major part of their conversation. Now outside the breeding season the numbers had been boosted.

Another difference was that the ground was much drier so it was easy to wander off the path towards where the main roost was.

After picking my way through the grass and rutted mud I stopped and scanned the trees. They had a ghostly look with drooping leaves lightened by droppings. I was definitely in the right place. The caws of crows were constant, always with a few croaking across the sky. But the real numbers were only hinted at whenever a tree exploded its avian load, usually whenever I moved. I didn’t want to disturb them so lingered for a few minutes on the outskirts of this central area before moving back to the main track. Most of the trees managed to hold on to their skittish corvids.

The highlight came as I finally decided to leave them in the fading light. At that moment there were fifty crows flying above me at about the height of the sugarpalms. The air was full of their satisfyingly throaty calls. Strolling along I realised that this aerial battalion stayed with me. At first I assumed that I was disturbing more birds from different trees as I moved along but watching more carefully, particularly by walking backwards, I saw that the same birds were actually following me. A loose swirl of dark shapes centred above my head. No cows, no herdsmen, just me and an escort of crows. Rather than trying to intimidate me, they were just making sure that I actually left. A connection that I managed to twist into meaning that they cared.

As an aside, a slightly depressing thought was to wonder how long that area of agricultural land would be left in its rough state. There were already some signs of planting that looked like the beginnings of a rubber tree plantation.

A nice side-effect of our house being due east of the roost is that all the crows commuting over us are chasing the sun. As it rises in the morning and sets in the evening. Blackened with soot and destined to never arrive.

I absolutely appreciate that I still know next to nothing about their lives but gazing at the skies above our garden during crow time I do feel a little closer to the crow nation.