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Post by Carolyn on Nov 21, 2003 4:10:33 GMT -5
We saw the weirdest thing last night, even my husband, who has been a birdwatcher for probably 50 years, had never seen anything like it.
We live in the north part of town. Last night about dusk (3:30-4:00), Anders happened to look out the window and noticed a LARGE swarm of birds in the sky. We are kind of used to this, because the small crow (kaja) tends to gather here on the rooftops until they get all their buddies with them and then they head downtown to spend the night in the trees around Stortorget and the church. However, this was much larger than the usual gathering and as we watched, additional smaller groups kept adding to this swarm. They were actually quite some distance away, but they would swirl around like schools of fish in a feeding frenzy, going back and forth across the sky in a wave-like pattern, and at each revolution, more and more birds would join them. There must have been at least a thousand or more birds there towards the end, and when we went out on our balcony, you could hear them all, VERY loud. This went on for about 20 minutes and at the end, the "cloud" of birds was quite dark and stretched out quite a distance in the sky. Then as we watched, pods of birds started breaking off and heading towards different parts of town.
Neither of us has ever seen this behavior before and it was incredibly impressive. Anybody know anything about this?
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Post by lizardek on Nov 21, 2003 6:35:30 GMT -5
I've seen something similar in our town a couple of times as well, over the little woods where the crows and jackdaws hang out and have their crow parties. It's the weirdest thing to watch.
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Post by Carolyn on Nov 21, 2003 7:51:25 GMT -5
We've had these "swirls" before, but I swear, what was impressive about this was the sheer size, there must have been a minimum of a thousand crows and quite possibly double that. It was Hitchcockian!  |
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Klant
New Member
Posts: 14
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Post by Klant on Nov 21, 2003 8:57:20 GMT -5
I honestly don't know exactly why they do this! I guess one could speculate that it's just normal flock behaviour to confuse predators? What I do know is that pretty much all crow birds are very social, and that they gang up together every now and then. Magpies have little conferences with 20 birds or so in a tree, and young crows hang out in packs over winter (I think a flock of crows is called a murder in English). A lot of juvenile crows and rooks migrate south over winter, and I assume that the same is true for jackdaws (kaja). So a guess about the large number would be that wintering/migrating jackdaws joined your locals. I was out walking one spring, pretty late, and all the jackdaws that were hanging out in just a few trees decided to do a fly-by right over the bike path where I was. It sky was darkened by them, and I could hear their wing flaps... Pretty cool  |
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Post by Carolyn on Nov 21, 2003 9:44:20 GMT -5
You should see the bicycles that were abandoned sometime ago outside Systemet in Stortorget. The crows have been spending the nights there and I swear to god, you couldn't give me enough money to touch one of those bikes. They positively drip bird poop!  |
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Vember
Junior Member
In Skellefte? with sambo Fredrik since January 2004
Posts: 67
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Post by Vember on Nov 21, 2003 20:29:45 GMT -5
They positively drip bird poop! I guess now we know why they remain abandoned!  |
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Post by Natooke on Nov 23, 2003 2:59:01 GMT -5
Your observations are in great detail … I’ve also seen this behaviour a few times in our own yard. One time I thought I was in “The Birds 2” as we have huge trees they seem to be able to have their conference & watch/hear the others flock in. They then fly to the near by factory & stoop on the rooftop, they are in the hundreds if not in the thousands. … Which I’ve come to the conclusion that a building has warmth radiating from it (maybe that’s why the city dwellers hang down town). We have a woodpecker that visits our old willow tree … she assuming it’s female isn’t coloured so beautifully, likes to get after the bugs under the bark. Another unusual wild bird we’ve seen was a Turkey … He had his whole body puffed up & was showing his plum to a man taking an evening walk … territorial thing. Our neighbours have small birds eat out of their hands, there has been many a generation who has been thought to come & eat cheese rather amazing watching the parents teach them. On the Southern tip of Öland is an observatory, we’ve taken the kids a couple of times to the exhibition centre. Ottenby Observatory ---> www.sofnet.org/ofstn/Engelska/index.htm |
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Post by Carolyn on Nov 23, 2003 3:34:58 GMT -5
Before I went back to the States for that long haul, we would have both blue tits and great tits come and take food from our hands and if we were inside and the balcony door was open, a few of the bolder, more confident ones would come inside, take bits of food from the marble window ledge or even perch on some of our potted plants and start squawking until we came with food. When you watch them feed outside and realize how extremely nervous and timid most of them are, I feel it's a great honor to be trusted by some of them, although it does take a long time.
We've hung two new feeders out, one with shelled peanuts in it and the other, a spring looking attachment you can stuff those suet/seed balls in. We want to get another one for the sunflower seeds. The main thing for us is trying to get them centered on our balcony so no bird mess bothers the neighbors below and also to make sure the smaller birds can feed without worries from the crows and magpies. They, after all, get their fair share downtown, cleaning up from humans, not to mention roadkill, etc.
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