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May 27, 1997  New York Times Interactive Edition

    The Too-Common Crow Is Getting Too Close for Comfort

          By JANE E. BRODY

Crows have never been popular.

Farmers, viewing them as a threat to crops, have often greeted them with
shotguns. In 1940 the Illinois Department of Conservation killed 328,000
crows with a single blast of dynamite. "Most people dislike crows
because they are just like we are," said Dr. Carolee Caffrey, a crow
researcher. "They hang around in groups and make a lot of noise. They're
troublemakers who like to take the easy way out."

Now, with huge migrations of crows into urban and suburban areas,
where they are flourishing on food scraps in trash bins, landfills and
garbage pails, more citified folks are getting on the birds' case --
with disparaging remarks if not shotguns. But even as some people find
new cause to view crows with disgust, these shiny black survivors of
urban and suburban sprawl are becoming more popular with scientists.

Dr. Caffrey, for one, a behavioral ecologist at Oklahoma State
University in Stillwater, recently completed an eight-year study of
western crows living near a Los Angeles golf course. She and others who
have been engaged in a flurry of new research are finding that in some
ways crows are more like people than people, to paraphrase a popular
song. They are faithful to their mates and helpful to their parents, and
they maintain a lifelong attachment to their birth families. But they
are also wary, wily and opportunistic.

Though scientists cannot document precisely the shifting of crow
populations (these commonplace look-alikes are not easy to count), it is
evident that in the last several decades millions of crows, once mainly
rural, are now breeding and feeding successfully in and around shopping
malls, city parks, golf courses and other heavily peopled metropolitan
sites.

In most states, crows are protected, having been classified as game
birds for which no hunting season is established. But they are still
likely to be shot at in some rural areas, though scientists say this can
be a grave mistake. As one Midwestern farmer sadly discovered after
killing off the crows that he thought were eating his corn crop, crows
have an even heartier appetite for the European corn borer. Without
crows to attack this devastating pest, the farmer's crop failed.

Now, shopping malls may be as attractive as corn fields. As many as
50,000 crows may roost near a single shopping center, attracted not only
by food but also by the all-night lights that help them spot predators.
In turn, scientists now have easy access to crows and are confirming
that the birds are playful, resourceful and fast to learn. They are also
discovering how communicative crows are, with a complex language that
researchers are only beginning to understand.

Perhaps no one has done more to stimulate scientific interest in crows
than Dr. Lawrence Kilham, an 87-year-old professor emeritus of
microbiology at Dartmouth Medical School whose interest in crows dates
to 1918, when as an 8-year-old he took an injured crow to his family's
summer home in New Hampshire. There the crow healed and flourished,
and all summer long it followed the boy through fields and woods and
everywhere else until he had to return to school in Brookline, Mass.

Kilham, a self-taught ornithologist, studied crows for more than 8,000
hours over a six-year period and produced a seminal work, "The
American Crow and the Common Raven" (1989, Texas A & M
University Press, College Station), that has helped to elevate the
status of crows among both professional and lay bird enthusiasts.

Detailed observations by Kilham, who had learned to recognize individual
crows living on a cattle ranch in Florida without having to mark them,
revealed that the birds were cooperative breeders that lived in large
family groups. Teen-agers from last year's brood and even young adults