However, I wonder and appreciate any wildlife that appears in our neighborhood. My spouse, Joyce, marvels that the first words that I sometimes speak to my elderly mother (who lives in the rural South where I was raised) is often about the wildlife that we have seen close to our house or on trips into the wilderness.
Many farmers also consider the Corvids (family name for crows, ravens,magpies, etc.) a pest because they feed on corn and other grains. Like the famous, cartoon magpies, Heckle and Jeckle, crows may eat the farmer's grain but they usually more than make up for what grain is taken by feeding on insects, worms and other crop pests. Crows are omnivorous and, in addition to previously mentioned critters, feed on seeds, nuts, and small rodents and amphibians as well as carrion.
As I head to work in the morning, I often see the crows roaming my side of the street with abandon. These are smart creatures, and have, in fact, been observed using automobiles to crush nuts. They drop the nuts on streets where cars pass and then pick up the meats after the cars have "cracked" the nuts.
Crows have also been observed using two distinctly different kinds of tools to forage for invertebrates such as insects, centipedes, and larvae. A biologist in the New Caledonian islands observed "both manufacture and use of a hooked tool made by plucking and stripping a barbed twig. He also observed the use, but not manufacture, of what he described as a "stepped cut tool" with serrated edges." (See the article at http://www.jcrows.com/crow.html .
Quite often Corvids are considered magical creatures and at least one culture, the Tibetan, has developed a tradition of divination using crows. Telling the future by means of the appearances and behavior of birds,especially their calls, is called "auspicy." For a complete look at fortune telling by use of crows, see William L. Cassidy's excellent article at http://www.jcrows.com/crolang.html .
I suppose one cannot write an article about the Corvids without including at least one anecdote about their legendary attraction to shiny objects. A Lakota woman of my acquaintance related to me that she and her famiiy nursed an injured crow back to health a few years ago. The bird apparently "adopted" her family. The crow made a nest high in the eaves of a barn and so lived on the farm near the Native American family for years.
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