Episode description:
In the shadows of our psyche lives a creature. Its form is dark, its features obscure, its expressions impenetrable. And so we project onto it our own fears, insecurities, and less savory tendencies. For most, the crow has become more myth than fact, an ill omen, a guttural scold in the background to mark a dark turn in a movie. In this profile we’re stripping away the artificae and discovering the fascinating world of one of our most common urban animals, the American crow. This is the Single Acorn Podcast.
Produced by: Crow’s Path
Hosted by: Professor Eweagey (aka Teage O’Connor), Glenn Etter, Dr. Christine Fleener
Supported by: Our patrons @ patreon.com/CrowsPath
For more natural history:
- Subscribe to the Wild Burlington Newsletter @ crowspath.org/newsletter
- Follow our blog: crowspath.org/blog
- Follow us on instagram: @crowspathvt
Theme music by: Jake Weiss
Logo design by: Caitlin LaDulce
Ads by: Sara Siegel
WORKS CITED
- “If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.”
- Crow’s Path (website)
- Rainbow crow story (link)
- Deer carcass (video)
- Taxonomy of crows (ITIS)
- 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border (Vox)
- Hunting of crows (source)
- West Nile virus emergence and large-scale declines of North American bird populations (source)
- Dead Crow Density and West Nile Virus Monitoring, New York (source)
- Survival rates in crows aged 0-1 in rural (35%) versus urban (52%) habitats (source)
- Red squirrels and depredation on bird nests (source)
- Gray squirrels and nest depredation (source)
- Floater flocks (source)
- Mortality rates in juveniles versus adults (source)
- Kaeli Swift on crow funerals (video)
- Crows having sex on a crow corpse – NSFW? (video)
- Man’s new best friend? A forgotten Russian experiment in fox domestication (source)
- Theory of mind training causes honest young children to lie (source)
- Selective caching of perishables first
- Population density around tern colony
- The Crow & The Pitcher, an Aesops fable (link)
- Clever crow uses physics to get its food (video)
- Crows and Ravens are Masters of Self-Control (source)
- Thermal video of crows at roost (video)
- PBS Documentary: A Murder of Crows (video)
- Effigies for Dispersing Urban Crow Roosts (source)
- For the birds: Downtown Sacramento using falconry to clear the sky of pooping crows (link)
- Portland crow poisoning: When it is legal to kill crows and how do we build empathy? (link)
