Syracuse.com - Fayetteville couple asks: Where have the crows gone?

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She said she and her husband are crow lovers and have "successfully fed them" in back of their home on Snooks Pond for 10 years.

Where are the crows?

Last week’s story about how the mild winter has affected the local bird scene, resulted in a number of emails and phone calls — one coming from Judith Fazio, of Fayetteville.

Fazio said she and her husband are crow lovers and have “successfully fed them” in back of their home on Snooks Pond for 10 years.

“Each morning they would wait in the trees, sometimes cawing, until my husband came out with their ‘food.’ This would be dog food, if we didn’t have any leftovers,” she said. “We always got a kick out of them dunking the hard dog food or Chinese fortune cookies in the bird bath. It was especially entertaining when the squirrels and the crows got into a tussle over this food.”

She said her husband, Sam, even added a plastic plate for the crows to the top of our pole-system bird feeder.

This past October, though, the crows just stopped coming and haven’t returned.

“We feel a bit sad and perplexed about the situation,” Fazio said. “A lot of people hate them. But we really miss them. They’re so smart. They’re our little entertainment.”

She said she understands that crows are very “family oriented.” Could the crow family just have decided to go elsewhere?

Kevin J. McGowan, from Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, said, “Yes, sometimes a family does just get up and leave.

“Typically the crows that breed in our area stay here year-round and stay on their home territory for at least a little bit each day. Non-breeding family members (offspring from up to five previous years) wander and might be gone for a few days or even most of the winter before returning home to help raise the next set of kids in April,” he said.

McGowan said crows come and go quite a bit. They leave to forage in communal areas (corn fields, dumps) where they congregate in flocks. They also leave at night sometimes to sleep in communal roosts.

“It is possible that the crows in your correspondent’s yard are just wandering a little and will be back. Or, one or more of them might have gotten killed (it is crow season, after all) and the family has broken up,” he said.

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog