2024, animals, Mysteries, Nature, Uncategorized

Murder Of Crows Mystery

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One nice thing about living out here is that no matter how hot it gets during the day, it almost always cools down at night because of the low humidity. That means we can turn off the air conditioning and open up the windows after midnight. Our town is also really quiet at night, with the only the occasional train whistle breaking the silence.

On Tuesday night I woke up at 3:30, turned off the air conditioning, and opened the windows. I had just settled back in bed when it started. Somewhere in our neighborhood, very close to our house, a bunch of crows began making a hullabaloo. First one crow would give voice, then four others would chime in. They were loud and raucous, and it went on and on for an hour and a half. They sounded really upset. I didn’t have the energy to get up and close the windows and turn the air conditioning back on, so I just put a pillow over my head, I finally fell back to sleep after they quit.

I believe Husband and the dog identified a possible motive for the crows’ behavior. Yesterday morning on their walk they came upon the corpse of a rabbit on the sidewalk near our house. The rabbit’s head was missing, and it looked as though it had been there for a couple of days. There is a small stream and slough several blocks from our house where a mink or weasel would feel quite at home. Minks and weasels decapitate their prey. I think the crows were sounding the alarm that a murder was being committed in our neighborhood. The crows have been quiet since Tuesday night. The next time they start a ruckus in the middle of the night I will have more sympathy for them and wonder who is being murdered this time.

What are night noises in your neighborhood? Any mysteries in your neighborhood? Any other creative theories for the headless rabbit or the crows’ alarm?

27 thoughts on “Murder Of Crows Mystery”

  2. More likely there was a raptor—a hawk or an owl—the crows were mobbing. I doubt, despite their collective noun, that crows would be boisterous about the demise of a rabbit except, possibly, by the prospect of a snack for themselves.

    That brings to mind a little game Robin and I have been playing lately—collective nouns. We were in Duluth for a day and walking the Lakewalk. Near the rose garden we met a cluster of RNs walking the other way, not surprising given the large medical facility across the street.

    I asked Robin, “What would be the collective noun for a group of nurses?”
    We came up with a Consultation, a Collaboration, a Preservation, and a Disinfection.

    Yesterday we passed about eight road construction workers walking single file, all of them wearing their bright fluorescent chartreuse and orange vests. Their collective noun? I suggested an Investiture.

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      1. Yes and no. I thought about that. But a blog post on collective nouns would first require suggesting groups to which a collective noun could be applied and that would, I expect, quickly become pejorative given the tenor of the times. The groups we invented collectives for were happenstance and relatively neutral.

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  3. I hear foxes and owls at night quite often. Foxes have the most eery screams and other vocalizations. When they’re together as a family they screech and whoop and giggle and carry on. It sounds like a small pack of hyenas. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but I do see foxes from time to time. I listened to a recording of foxes calling at night and figured it out from that. The barred owls are easy for me to identify. Their call is the familiar “Whoo cooks for youuu, whoo cooks for youuu-ahhh!” I also hear frogs at night, but I haven’t heard anything from Herb’s extensive clan lately. They’re done mating now, so it’s not necessary to call so much. I really heard it a lot in May and June.

    There’s a small murder of crows here too. I see them in the morning, making plans. They sit in the tops of the trees and loudly debate the best course of action.

    There are mysteries here, but I suspect it’s just a tempest in a teapot, so I don’t get involved. I do wonder why my neighbor, the president of our association, is such a bully. (I phrase this question differently inside my own head.)

    I’d like to say owls, but they’d try to carry off the whole carcass. Maybe an owl was trying, but the crows interfered and the owl just couldn’t carry it off? Crows will eat the carcass, so it would benefit them if the owl did murder, and the crows chased away the owl.

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    1. The question would be, “why would a bully want to be president of the HOA?” The answer is obvious.

      I doubt the demise of the rabbit and the clamor of crows are related.

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      1. I have. It seems that he’s the only one who wants the job. There is so much apathy but people will always complain when something isn’t done just right. For a while there weren’t even enough people who wanted to be on the board. My neighbor keeps getting elected since no one runs against him. Since 2001.
        ~Kristanon

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  4. Well, we still have some fireworks that go off sporadically. Sometimes I’ll wake to a couple of teenagers walking down our alley and talking – our bedrooms are right on the alley.
    Most of my questions are about the dawn and the bedtime choruses – which birds are making those songs?

    Crows are something else. They sometimes caw in a rhythmic beat – like the morse code’s long-short-long-short-long… Heard this on a friend’s front porch recently, and I thought “That crow has either a sense of rhythm, or a sense of humor”.

    Thinking…

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  5. We occasionally have a murder of crows yakking it up in our neighborhood, but I’ve never seen the cause of one of their conferences.

    We’re on the corner of a fairly busy road, so cars passing late at night in summer with the windows open may wake me if they’re loud enough. But the real hotrodders usually confine their turbocharged noisemakers to daylight hours.

    I hear barred owls now and then too. Funny that they just started making their presence known in my neighborhood a few years ago. Never heard one for almost 20 years, then all of a sudden, they show up. Go figure.

    We had a loudly barking dog about a block away that sometimes went on for an hour or so at two in the morning. *GRRRRR* Where the hell is the owner in that situation?

    Chris in Owatonna

    **BSP** Don’t miss one of the great small-town community festivals in Minnesota tomorrow, the Hopkins Raspberry Festival. I’ll be selling my books on 10th and Main St. for the Marketplace Fair from 9 am to 4 pm. Dozens of vendors, music, food, fun and games for the kids, great people watching, and you might even see the Raspberry Queen and her court walking up and down Main St. And no, I don’t think she is required to wear a raspberry-colored dress. 🙂

    Come on down to Hopkins, chat with me and buy a book or two, browse the other merchandise, have some delicious street food (being located downwind from the Kettle Corn vendor is torture for me because I could eat that stuff nonstop if I had no willpower.

    Weather looks good for most of the day. Low chance of rain, not windy. Near perfect summer weather to be outside. **END BSP**

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  6. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    My neighborhood is quiet, but we live 3 blocks from the fire and police stations, so if there is human noise, it is the sirens. Occasionally we hear a coyote howling very close by, as well as foxes and crows. Recently there have been many baby bunnies, and in the mornings I find tufts of hair scattered in the back yard, and I just do not think too hard about that. But the ultimate violation happened Tuesday night. Wednesday morning I looked out the window at my garden to note that all the beets in my large raised bed were missing. A deer feasted on those. I hope that deer gets the trots from all the roughage. Hmph.

    OT: Phoebe report. This dog, who weighed 28 pounds before her illness, lost 3 pounds in three weeks. She is now famished. Tuesday she ate so much way too fast, then proceeded to be sick all over the house. Ugh. Yesterday I was careful to give her a lot of food in small servings throughout the day. That all stayed down. She is starting to show her delightful personality a bit more again. Her right rear leg has recovered, but left one is still somewhat stiff and hard to maneuver. So she continues to be on the mend, but it will take some time.

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  9. A coworker of mine used to work at a gas station on the outskirts of town, and someone spilled a big bag of sunflower seeds in the outside the ftont door. A group of resident crows cleaned them up. Some days after the seeds were gone. My coworker heard a tapping on the door. She checked but nobody was there. This happened several times until she realized it was a crow tapping on the door, presumably wanting more seeds. She obliged. The crows only tapped when she was at work. I gather that crows can discriminate between different human faces.

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  10. Wow! The trains in North Dakota still have whistles! The daily Amtrak to Chicago and back that stops here in Holland, MI, only has a raucous horn which we hear from far away. The multiple daily freights are similar.

    The last time I heard a train whistle was in the spring of 1978, when the main line of Taiwan’s Railway used steam locomotion for the local trains that weren’t going far. I’m surprised that such equipment is still in use in North Dakota. You guys have some catching up to do.

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