Tuesday

Today the ladies on my hall who come in early so they "can get work done while it's quite" were making a lot of noise. They were loud because the crows outside their windows were louder.

We had to talk about the crows. Crows are big birds, they seem bigger than they were years ago. Crows and ravens are the same bird, if you live in a poor neighborhood you have crows, if you live in a rich neighborhood you have ravens.

They are different birds The raven has a larger beak and they have different tails and feather arrangement.

The crows being loud outside means something about the state of the winter, either it's going to start snowing next week or it's going to be warm.

A quick check online to see if I need to invest in antifreeze told me that crows very often roost together in the winter for safety and warmth I would presume, hundreds, thousands, millions in cases can be roosting together. What we were experiencing was dozens maybe and it was too late in the day for roosting. They were  however making a huge amount of  unscheduled noise.

Why do they make noise? They are threatened, unhappy, protecting themselves. But from what? There were blue jays in the trees too, and they were also very unhappy. But why? Were they made at each other? Were the squirrels involved? Is this about the pecans? Who is watching the wood chucks? Are they in danger?!

I went and looked out the window and I found out why all the noise - I thought I was seeing a hawk, we have a lot of  hawks on campus. It was not a hawk, it was an owl! A predator of crows, and it was just sitting there being a great big owl. It was probably a Great Horned Owl, as the internet told me that they hunt crows, this morning it was just stalking the crows. It looked at us and looked at them and was all owl-y and vaguely threatening because it was big, really big and had big talons and a huge beak . Not friendly or cute, not like a Harry Potter owl at all.

The owl took off and the crows all flew away and we got back to work.