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The Slice: More evidence that crows know

Last Friday, I told my crows story. Today, a few Slice readers get their turn. One morning in early September, a large number of the big black birds descended on Pamela Pschirrer’s back yard. Her miniature schnauzer, Mister Asterbilt, monitored the winged invasion through a glass door. And then the dog took action.

“He hit the doggy door going a hundred miles an hour,” wrote Pschirrer, a program administrator at the Gonzaga University School of Law.

The eviction commenced.

“He chased those crows, crisscrossing our huge back yard for several minutes, until he was finally satisfied he had chased every one of them away. He came back in the house and flew up to sit on my lap, panting like crazy.”

The dog was pleased with a job well done.

But sometimes a state of well-being can be short-lived.

“Suddenly we heard a tick, tick, tick from above.”

Pschirrer looked up at the skylight in the ceiling. She saw a couple of crows tapping the glass with their beaks.

“I swear they were just taunting Mister for chasing them, because they were looking directly at him.”

Here’s Paula Grayhek’s evidence that these are smart birds:

“My father-in-law asked my husband to bring his rifle to the lake place to scare off a crow that had started constantly cawing at 4 in the morning,” she wrote.

So the time came for the warning shot.

“The crow saw the rifle, flew off and shut up forever more with not a shot fired.”

Pullman’s Julie Wilkerson recalled when she lived in Oklahoma and there was a big pecan tree beside her family’s home. “We’d never see crows in our yard until the pecans ripened,” she wrote. “Then a bunch of enormous crows would show up to harvest for us.”

She said they would bang the hulls on the roof to open them. “They made quite a racket, but at least they didn’t eat at night.”

David Townsend, volunteer coordinator at the Coeur d’Alene Public Library, cautioned me against getting on the bad side of the black birds.

“It is a scientifically proven fact — at least among my people and several other cultures — that crows are, in fact, the souls of former hunters, warriors and Scoutmasters who became lost in the wilderness.”

Do not taunt them, he said.

“I find it advisable to greet these birds with a respectful, ‘Good day, brother crow,’ and recommend that you do so as well. Gulls and pigeons, on the other hand, are really just flying rats, so you can pretty much say whatever you like.”

Vince Eberly added one last note: “You have to be suspicious of an animal whose group is referred to as a murder.”

•Today’s Slice question: Without looking at a map, do you know how North Idaho’s big lakes compare in size to the Great Lakes in the Midwest?

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