Halloween Black Crows

Black Crows are large, scary and very black. But that's not the scariest thing about these birds. They are highly intelligent and can remember faces, places and yes, they can even hold grudges too!

Crows are Intelligent

Apparently if a single crow is killed in an area, crows will change their entire migration pattern to avoid that address. Yes, really. A single crow dies and they remember....they all remember.

There are millions of crows and they can remember your face. So don't go out and antagonize a crow. Keep your distance because all that cawing they do is a language! Well, scientists are pretty sure that they are communicating through a crow language although it has not been absolutely proven. Crows from different areas appear to have "dialects" and dialects only come from having a language in the first place.

Crows can figure things out. They have been known to actually memorize garbage truck routes because they know then, when the garbage will be put out. They also know that garbage men are prone to perhaps dropping some tasty morsels and the crow will be right there to make sure he gets this treat.

Crows have Adapted to the Human World

Crows have studied and figured out our human world and they use it to their advantage. If they find a tasty nut and need to get that shell off they will drop it from just the right height so it will break. If that doesn't work they will use a car as a nutcracker. Yes, a car.

Any car driving down the road. They will time the cars movements by the traffic lights and then drop it so it gets run over and cracked. Then when the light is red, and they know this is safe because they have observed cars stopping, they will retrieve their nut. Is that intelligent or what?

Yes, beware the crow, he is smart, he has a great memory and he communicates with thousands of other crows. Add the large size and the ominous solid black colour and you have the perfect Halloween bird - the Crow.

Black crows are great addition to Halloween decor! I purchased some realistic crows back in the day when my children were young. We used these each year on the porch and some trick or treaters looked twice before coming up on the porch. I saw a couple kids take a swing at them as if they could shoo them away so they were pretty convincing. You can find very realistic crows on sites such as Amazon and they appear to be much like the birds I purchased years ago. It seems the crow is still very popular as a decoration.

Remember the movie, "The Birds" by Alfred Hitchcock. This is was a very frightening movie in that era and to me it is still scary today mainly because it is so realistic.

Birds organizing and communicating is certainly quite possible; especially for the very intelligent crow. This makes the movie even more frightening than most horror films today. Films in this genre currently are so far fetched that they cannot be believed. So treat your children to something special by taking them to a classic horror film like this but be sure they are old enough because you don't want them to be afraid of our feathered friends.

Alfred Hitchcock was way ahead of his time in creating suspenseful movies. He really knew how to capture his audience and have them sitting on edge of their seats till the end of the movie. "The Birds" is certainly one of those films.

So you still think that this film is also just a little far fetched? Read about the Chatham crows. Now if these crows decided that they did not want to abandon Chatham the outcome of this story could have been much different. This is what happened.

This is "The Birds" in real life (well, almost). Its seems that migrating crows decided that Chatham was a good rest point when they were migrating. Apparently the word spread among the crows and before you know it there were hundreds of thousands of crows descending on this small farming community.

Crows Out of Control

What to do? The crows were ruining crops and the towns' livelihood. So the townspeople were told that the hunt was on as it was the only way to reduce the numbers and save their crops.

The hunters went out took a shot and killed a crow. Yes, only one crow; that was all it took. The crows decided Chatham was no longer a safe haven and make sure they did not take a rest stop near the farmlands again. The problem was solved. After that one shot they all flew off to safety.

Now the Crow Problem was Solved

The townspeople had thought they were in for a long hunt because there were about half a million crows in the area; it had become that popular as a rest stop. But word gets around fast with crows and they were never bothered again.

The crows made sure from then on that when they passed over Chatham that they stayed very high and away from the areas that were occupied by people.