Readers often ask: “Advise how to protect your garden from crows, especially in the early spring? This is a real disaster, comparable to the invasion of locusts, when spits out everything… and nothing helps!”. For help, we turned to an authoritative ornithologist. However, it is unlikely that his advice can be considered comforting…
Raven’s mind
As if the ravens not apply, it is impossible not to admit that they are almost our “brothers in mind”. At the heart of their complex behavior and diversity of relationships is highly developed “elementary mental activity.” The level of development comparable to crow, wolves, dogs and cats.
My colleague? doctor of biological Sciences is studying the fine structure of the brain of birds. It was always assumed that the “wise” bird — the Raven. However, from his work it follows that the gray crow-smarter! Her brain is much more complex than a Raven’s.
With grey crows we encounter all the time, especially the visible they become in the cold season. The first month and a half after fledging broods are kept separately from each other, and then gradually begin to unite. Since October, birds are going to spend the night in large flocks. After broods banded together in small local groups, between the birds there is a kind of “roll call”, where each of the pack alternately crow caws, and the rest are silent. The voice of each of the birds is different and it seems that the group listens to the voices of all individuals of the local community. All of them know each other personally, which is manifested in the observance of hierarchy in relationships, as well as in joint research or manipulative activities, imitation, fingering feathers and collective games.
A sign that crows have elementary reason is that they play with pleasure. None of the birds (except, of course, large parrots) do not have more variety in entertainment than crows. One of the most common collective games-the game-pursuit, when a bird, grabbed in the beak of any small object, chased by another bird, and, catching up, intercepts it in his beak, and the first has no resistance.
Love to play crows and dogs. You can often see one of them sneaks up on a dog’s tail, pulling it, and the other at this time trying to steal something, even inedible.
Outside the law
It would seem-what a cute creature! However, the gray crow is the only bird that delivered “beyond the law”. Extraction and destruction of this feathered is allowed throughout the year. And there are reasons for that.
Crows cause great harm to the bird world, ruining nests, scaring and destroying broods. The crow is almost omnivorous, but prefers live prey, which will only be able to overcome. Not only is it a beetle, a mouse or vole, and hare, pigeon, animals in distress. In the cities, relatively few songbirds partly because of the grey Raven.
Every year at the end of may and the beginning of June in mass media continually describe cases of attack of crows on people. The reason for this is simple — birds selflessly protect their Chicks, who just at this time leave the nest and fly even worse. Passers-by usually do not notice the Chicks, but the crows do not know and swoop on their heads, pecking, scratching. This phenomenon lasts no more than two weeks and it is not necessary to make a sensation out of it, as the press sometimes does.
Is there a solution?
Sometimes the crows damage the garden — pull out the seedlings, pecking berries and fruits, destroying the nests of songbirds. How to ward off unwanted neighbors?
Experience shows that crows quickly get used to various scaring devices — stuffed animals, crackers, noisy objects, etc. — if measures for scaring off are not regularly supported by shooting. In one of the airports, they even sat on a carbide gun, which was installed to scare them away.
Crows are too smart to cope with them one way. Best of all-do not create conditions that attract these birds. Observe sanitary requirements, clean food, household and organic waste. Don’t let the crows nest next door.
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