It was very clear they knew exactly what the gun was, and knew to stay clear of it when they saw it. I never thought about crows the same after that.

When they show up and start settings up, the crows swarm them and poop everywhere. It's pretty crazy.

* Puppy mills fall under USDA regulation, because animals are livestock. The agency has been enabling cruelty on mass scale for years, through failure to police simple standards. http://www.caps-web.org/blogs/our-least-favorite-acronym/

* Remember the food pyramid? It's been tugged not by science but by grain and meat interests for years. eg, http://www.ruralvotes.com/thebackforty/?p=4805

* Grazing federal lands (USDA forest service...) is a subsidy for ranchers that damages via erosion and contamination. I'm okay with that but the cost should be borne by the ranchers and reflected in product pricing, not via the taxpayers.

* Meat inspection is a joke. Have you eaten any prions (CJD, mad cow) lately? No one knows because we don't require bulk testing. Hormones, antibiotics in the farm runoff? Bacterial resistance? You're paying for that in the long run too. Mor USDA failure to protect the public.

* Corruption? Sure: http://www.cornucopia.org/2015/05/latest-usda-scandal-organi...

Not my favorite agency.

What happens in the fall and winter is that they roost in mass in large trees in large numbers -- I'm talking tens of thousands of birds.

We tend to get them in our trees in the morning for some reason, and they aren't as active, so it isn't that big of a deal. But a few blocks away they land in the evening and make a lot of noise -- it's almost like car horns.

With the fireworks, they don't aim at them, but almost set them up in a "box" to agitate them. I think the objective is to get them broken up into smaller groups and move off to a less populated area. The freaky thing is the distressed crow noises coming from a PA in the back of the truck.

I probably would have went inside and left the remains to nature. I commend your bravery. It seems like a squad of crows could do some real damage to a person.

Also, I can confirm that raccoons are very intelligent. They're basically like dogs but with more "street smarts". I learned this after trying to get one to leave my attic.

Also, a side note about Raccoons: be sure not to expose yourself to their droppings (for example, if one is living in your attic, don't go and clean up their droppings without proper protection). They can apparently contain some airborne parasite which can kill you in days if inhaled.

A group of crows is called a murder, not that it matters, but it fits the theme of the story a bit.

There are a small number of ye olde Englishe words for some types of groups (like school of fish) and some of the fanciful names from the book have moved into common usage, but the dramatically expanded version is not known to have ever been actually used

some info here https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/resources/view/resour...

this is one old source https://archive.org/details/cu31924031031184

http://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/hps/

It's rare enough that individual cases end up on TV.

That's interesting - do you mean as a part of a social club, or actual scholarly study of survival techniques? Or maybe to support a major in something like archeology? Or maybe a military college?

And even where there aren't strict requirements, students sometimes end up with a few extra "free" course credits (e.g. to stay full time for a final semester). Uni staff/faculty are often willing to teach a course like this because it's fun and they get a couple grand for teaching young people about their hobby for an hour every week.

FWIW I took a rock climbing course like this (last semester, had a few extra credits my scholarship paid for in any case, and didn't have time for a real course due to travel). There was just enough "scholarly study" to make the course barely legit (read 2 books and discussed safety techniques in a science-y way), but 99.9% of the time was spent climbing.

The UK aggressively specialises. I started to specialise towards CS at around 16, and started to drop arts and other subjects then, two years before university, and at university I never took anything outside the CS course (apart from one Latin course, but that was unusual because I could already program).

Droppings from crows and other birds can spread Parrot fever on the other hand.

Sun rays eliminate several of those problems, like Leptospira. Droppings in the garden should be more "clean" than in your attic.

The "mouse virus" is a different thing.

Sorry but you've lost the plot on this one. Seen way to many movies.

Single birds might become territorial when they have young and you might lose a eye. But thats it.

I'd watch less TV/'current affairs'/crows are smart stories if I was you.

Alcohol, tobacco and mental issues.... now those are scarry killers.

Birds weight so little compared to a human that our eyelids mass is significant on that scale.

The reason birds don't attack people is because a human randomly flailing can outright kill crows by the dozen and evolution selects against suicide.

Bees attack people, and they are quite a bit smaller.

Humans in wartime volunteer for suicide missions, too, if they deem the payout for their comrades high enough.

Really. Got any reliable sources on that, using a reasonable definition of "voluntary", based on sources other than veteran war stories[0] and film plots? :-)

(a reasonable interpretation of "not voluntary" includes all people who were forced to join the army because it was the only viable career-option for their socio-economic class)

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it seems highly likely that the perceived frequency of these occurrences must be extremely inflated because it's been in the interest of war propaganda anywhere since forever, to pretend that knowingly volunteering for a suicide mission is not only perfectly sensible, not only extremely noble, but that this is in fact what you already signed up for, so why are you still standing here?

Then there's the question whether this is even relevant in the context of evolution. Soldiers have to be trained and drilled intensively for the explicit purpose of artificially altering their learned instincts which seems to me quite solid evidence of the contrary; that this behaviour is exactly not part of human nature, and that humans by default will not act like this unless you train them to.

You can probably train crows to suicide-attack humans as well.

[0] I realise leaving out this group leaves the data a bit thin on the ground, but given the extreme biases involved, it's useless data. So many stories people would rather not talk about, to name just one bias. Or stories altered after the fact (like they actually drew lots but tell it as voluntary because they are thankful and know it could've been them just as easily).

Rolling forward at 5 MPH he disappeared under my car only to dart up at the last moment to a telephone line overhead. I looked in my rear-view mirror out of confusion to find that the crows "limp" was in fact a walnut that he was aligning with my tire for me to crack.

Corvids are smarter than I can understand.

I wish I could know what they were thinking.

You got lucky. Here in India, crows get electrified all the time and if you try to clean up a good set of crows will peck on you.

And trust me I've been pecked once and it hurts real bad, some times it rough enough to make a person bleed.

The attacks started after I walked past a crow on the ground that was apparently injured or something. Once I _made eye contact_ (!) with that crow, the others up in the tree went beserk and started the attacks.

This happened about a month ago, right? I think it's far too early to conclude they don't bear a grudge. Those crows you see around your hours are probably surveilling your habits and movements, so they can plan your demise.

It's no coincidence that the collective noun for a group of crows is "murder".

;-)

It's possible the birds knew OP wasn't the killer and were hoping to intimidate them into leaving the body alone in hopes of catching the real killer, but that's just a guess.

Or the birds remembered the real killer of their fellow crow but then OP showed up and so therefore, ipso facto, he must've killed the crow but they couldn't know both couldn't kill the crow because they are birds so shriek.