A conversation with Teage O’Connor

By Fiona Medeiros, for the Community News Service

BURLINGTON — Teage O’Connor is a naturalist, author and the executive director of Crow’s Path, a Burlington-based educational nonprofit. In this conversation, he delves into crow wintering behavior and the bird’s presence in our area. Right now, thousands of crows are starting to congregate around town and O’Connor, who sometimes leads trips to view them, took a moment to share what he has learned about their temperaments and tendencies.

Q. What does the wintering process look like for crows?

A. We lose about 85% of bird species every year as they migrate south for the winter. Crows aren’t migratory in the same way, but they do have a daily migration. All plants and animals in the Northeast, because winters are so extreme, have to have some adaptation for dealing with winter, so they can either tolerate it or leave.

Crows decide to stick around. They’re not migratory. For the winter, they are migratory in the morning and afternoon, every day throughout the entire winter. It tends to start in October (and go) through the start of the nesting season. By late March into April, the roost starts to break up. Even though crows have an incredibly complex language, we can’t just ask them. And there are some competing hypotheses about why crows might take on this daily migration. Why are they migrating every single day? It’s not totally clear.

It sounds like a lot, but we have hawks that migrate down to Central America, several thousands of miles. We have Arctic terns that migrate like 30,000 miles a year. And so the daily migration of crows going from their daytime foraging social areas to their nighttime winter roost sites ultimately doesn’t wind up being too big of a trip.

Q. Does daily migration center around temperature or feeding, or is it just part of a routine they have in the winter?

A. If we think about what’s hard about winter, there’s lots of snow, it’s colder, the days are shorter. When we go through those factors that make winter so difficult, the roosting pattern starts to make more sense. Snow coverage doesn’t necessarily affect them. When you see a tree silhouette in the winter, it’s got all these ragged branches on it. If you see a tree silhouette in the winter with crows on it, it looks like a summer tree, with all the crows being the leaves and they’re totally full.

If you look at the demographic of who’s in the roost, it tends to be younger, unmated individuals and family units. One of the ideas is that with this incredibly complex language crows have, they’re able to communicate to other crows complex information and some of that information could be flirting, right? So if it’s mostly juveniles, it’s like a bunch of teenagers at the mall hanging out, trying to impress each other and find a mate for the spring. The other part is if you’re going to impress someone, you can’t just say ‘you’re amazing,’ you have to demonstrate you’re amazing. Part of what happens is demonstrating via information-sharing around where great resources are.

Q. What makes urban areas, and therefore Burlington, so attractive to crows?

A. Heat island effect. Cities tend to be warmer than forested counterparts nearby. There also are fewer top predators in cities than in suburban and forested areas. Barred owls and other predators of crows aren’t as present. So it’s nice during the night, when you’re sedentary and not as vigilant, to be in an area where there’s fewer predators around. 

Q. Are there best spots to spot the Burlington crow roost?

A. No, there is no best spot and this is partly what I love about it. I’m drawn to natural history because you realize how idiosyncratic certain things are. With the crows, they’re not faithful to any one spot. It’s sort of like temperament almost. 

They’re flying to a spot where they’ll sleep, and they don’t want to broadcast to predators where they’ll be. So they’re flying in different directions and they’re trying to say, “Hey, follow us.”  And if you could get the group to follow you to a new sleep location, that might also build up your reputation. They kind of lunge in these different directions, and then eventually one group might win out. It is really strange. It doesn’t happen like this every night, but when you’re there and it happens, it’s phenomenal because it’s super, super loud. Then it just gets deathly silent, and the thousands of crows all fly to where their final roost is. And it’s like a special, magical moment.

Q. Are there any other abilities that crows have that highlight their intelligence, aside from communication and language?

A. Yeah, there’s a lab at the University of Washington that did a lot of crow behavior research. Weirdly, crows have some sort of death culture or celebration, though a lot of animals don’t recognize death and may not even have a strong sense of other individuals. If a crow sees a dead crow, they will gather others and come in a circle around that crow. Crows have culture for sure. They can teach each other things.

Q. I heard that a group of crows is called a murder. Do you know where that comes from?

A. One of the first works printed by a woman on the printing press was this treatise on hunting and falconry and other sort of bushcraft-type things. I think it’s from 1400 or 1500, but in there (the author) lists like 200 collective nouns and she just made a bunch of them up. Like there’s no source before that that has those collective nouns, and they’re kind of absurd and are more poetic.

My assumption would be that people have a negative stereotype of crows, and associate them with the macabre, as they have sort of this opaqueness to them. They’re also prominent in cultures around the world that have species that are associated with tricksters. I don’t know if it was this woman who came up with that term. But again, it’s more poetic than anything.