Crow Busters Forum

It's OK to blast his buddies--crows have no morals.

That idea works very very well especially if they are yelling for help! On occasion a red tailed hawk will grab  one. One case I remember well the crazy hawk started to chow down on it and then tried to fly away but the crow ran out of string and the red tail let it go and didn't come back.

I read a scientific article about a series of incidents where toads were exploding around a picturesque lake in Germany. Authorities originally suspected young boys of committing the atrocities with fireworks (we always get the blame for some reason), but after careful observation, it was learned that crows were catching the toads, flipping them over, and removing their livers with the skill of a trained surgeon. The defensive response of a toad is to inflate itself with air to make it appear larger, or at least harder to swallow. By trying to inflate themselves with a hole in their abdomens, they only succeeded in blowing their own guts out, and dying a slow, agonizing death. Several biologists really began to observe the crows more closely, and discovered that all the crows performing these mutilations were from the same family. Each year, the parents taught their new offspring how to pull off this trick, and their children from the preceding years were teaching their offspring how to mutilate the toads. Fortunately these crows were for some reason confined to this valley around this lake, and the researchers had not observed this behavior any where else...so far. If they can teach their offspring to do that to a toad, teaching them to crack some nuts should be a snap. I wonder if they've trained them to beware of old fat men in white Chevy trucks? Hmmm...might be time to trade vehicles.