Low Info

Last post, I wrote about fish crows, a bird of very few words. A pair of them will be flying along and one says, “krokk;” and after a bit, the other says “krokk” and maybe adds another “krokk” or not; and that’s it, end of conversation.

Fish crows are, like all crows, famously social. And society requires communication: no communication, no community. So crows should have a lot to say to each other and the other crows I have around here, American crows, definitely do. But fish crows: “you good?” “yup.”

As I said in that last post, crow researchers know a good bit about what crows are saying and it’s what you’d expect: they warn each other about threats, they update about threats moving closer, they argue over territory, they tell each other about food, they arrange meetings. The little ones ask for food, the big ones tell them to stop asking. But those are American crows and everybody, honest, every American knows how incessant, how noisy they are. So I have a burning question: how can fish crows say all those things crows need to say if they just say a word or two at a time?

This question is related in my distractible little brain to the problem that deep sea submarines have with communicating with ships at the surface. The radio waves they use for communicating get dimmed by all that ocean in between. True, extra-long radio waves get through the ocean better but can’t carry much information. I think of a radio wave as a beat, bink-bink-bink; and extra-long radio wavelengths have extra-long times between beats, bink——bink. So all the surface ships say to the deep sea submarines is, for instance, Get up here.

Anyway, fish crows are putatively in the same situation as deep sea submarines, you can’t say much with a krokk or two. And I’m back to my question of fish crows maintaining a society but able to communicate very little information. So I asked a crow researcher, in fact, THE crow researcher, Kevin McGowan at the Cornell Ornithology Lab. Now I paraphrase or quote him because he’s a terrific communicator himself.

“I am happy to talk about Fish Crows. They live their lives differently than American Crows and probably have different things to say. They do have a number of different calls that are used in different situations.” He has a list of their calls in his chapter on fish crows, which I’ll summarize as: calls defending territory against other crows (“Awwr”); calls to talk during flight, often in groups (“Ewh” or “Uh-uh”); calls while mobbing or attacking predators, including researchers (“Awwpp” or “aggressive rattle”); calls by little ones (“begging call”) or parents (“feeding call”) during feeding; and “meow,” a “soft, odd call, heard once given repeatedly by breeding male sitting near nest where female was laying eggs or beginning incubation. Function unknown.” Isn’t that nice?

McGowan adds information not essential to my original inquiry because would he be a crow researcher if he didn’t? nope. “Fish Crows do not hold permanent territories the way most American Crows do, and young Fish Crows do not stay with their parents for long, and do not help them raise subsequent broods of young.” And in a report on crows, he adds further: “Fish Crows defended small territories at the nest site only during breeding season. When not breeding, Fish Crows congregated at dependable foraging areas. Fish Crows joined American Crows in foraging flocks and nocturnal roosts. Fish Crows did not have helpers attending their nests. No marked Fish Crow was ever seen attending the nest of its parents.” He sends me all this information: “Not that it’s much help; we just have not studied Fish Crows enough to understand them.” The fish crow chapter he wrote starts with, “Much more study needed.”

I am charmed, stunned like a cobra by a snake charmer, with all this. But then he undermines my entire low-info, bink——bink inquiry: “When groups [of fish crows] get together for foraging or roosting, they can be VERY vocal. You would not think they had little to say then.”

Oh. Ok. I’m on familiar ground now, being wrong. I’ve heard fish crows only when they’re flapping over my house by themselves or with a friend. I haven’t hung around their roosts, climbed up to their nests, camped out in woods and fields with binoculars, audio recording and photographing and writing everything down. I haven’t been a good field anthropologist with regard to fish crows; I haven’t lived with the tribe. So I’m entirely grateful to Kevin McGowan. My favorite photo of him is a bemused selfie at the top of a pine tree, his free hand ready to pick up a squalling baby crow; he looks vaguely worried.

And because I’m now emboldened by McGowan’s researchly example of adding information you might be pleased to know whether you’ve asked for it or not and in fact you didn’t but I do like the Cornell Ornithology Lab (and its Merlin app which everyone I know, really everyone, uses) so much: I’ll link to the information-with-sound-effects about how to tell fish and American crows apart. And because somebody is going to suggest that maybe I’m hearing not fish crows but ravens, no way, our Helen says; and I say, no way on earth.

_________

via Wikimedia, Creative Commons: Plate 146 of Birds of America by John James Audubon depicting Fish Crow.

The post Low Info appeared first on The Last Word On Nothing.