Sunday 2 February 2020

Fishing for Crows in Fort Erie

This weekend I was down in the Niagara area to celebrate my joint birthday with Cait.  We had a great time, and I even got out on Saturday afternoon to do some bird watching along the river.  I had some of the usual Niagara specialties.  Still lots of gulls along the river, but no kittiwake or Blakc-headed Gulls for me this time!  Some heavy snow at Queenston prevented me from finding the usual Black Vultures.

On Sunday morning I got up before church with the goal of finding Fish Crows!  After driving around for a while I eventually caught up with a good group of crows and quickly heard a few calling!  Fish Crows have a very unique call that is much different than the raucous call of their American counterpart.  I liken it to a squeaky toy.  I sat in my car for a while to avoid scaring off this flock, and I think there may have been as many as 10 Fish Crows!  I took an audio and video of some of these birds as well as some photos through the heavy, wet snow from this morning.





Click on the youtube video below to hear one the Fish Crow in the above photo calling.

I also made an audio file of a bunch of the Fish Crows calling and saved it to my google drive, I think it should work for public listening too.  Click the link below to hear them!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yLQ0RffAvo7FHTtubAWkKPOCDv3aG0x8/view?usp=sharing

Fish Crows are definitely one of my favourite birds to see in the Fort Erie area and I was glad to catch up with this species once again!