Fish Crow

Lakeshore, Burlington, ON. March 18^th. 2021.  Fish Crow! So, which is it: fish or crow? Well it is a crow, but after that it becomes tricky so, bear with me.  Across most of eastern North America the common, default crow is the American Crow, its range is essentially everywhere south of the Arctic Circle and coast to coast; it has several lookalikes including this one, the Fish Crow. It is almost identical, though with a somewhat slighter build, a different voice, and its much smaller range is a narrow band along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from Rhode Island to Texas. However…

Just a handful of years ago Fish Crows started showing up here on the shores of Lake Ontario, first one, then another, and another, a totally unexpected surprise.  They stayed and in time their numbers have increased.  They are very much a novelty restricted to a few small corners in a couple of leafy lake-side neighbourhoods.

This year is the first of five years of field work to gather and compile evidence of breeding for Ontario’s third Breeding Bird Atlas. Our task is to find signs of breeding activity of any and all species. So today, even though it’s still a bit early in the year, I went looking for Fish Crows.  I wanted to see if their activity would look like courtship or perhaps point to possible nest sites, work easier done before the trees leaf out. I found the crows in their leafy neighbourhood, as anticipated, but many more than expected. At times there were seven or eight flying, tumbling, chattering and chasing each other around, like children in a school playground. Fish Crow is a notably sociable species and, because it’s still a little early, such play doesn’t necessarily mean that breeding will follow. It’s also possible that all the birds within this group were related, parents and a couple of years’ offspring.

Now that said, some of them, sometimes two, sometimes four, gathered around what looked like a tattered old nest at the top of this towering Norway Spruce. It might turn out to be a renovation project for this year’s brood or it maybe it’s just somewhere that makes them think. It’ll all become clear in a month or two.