Refuge Notebook • Vol. 17, No. 12 • March 20, 2015

Ode to crows, ravens, jays and by John Morton

Silhouette of the Steller’s , one of five corvid found on the Kenai Peninsula. Georg Steller, itsnamesake, was the naturalist who accompanied Commodore Vitus Bering on his exploration of Alaska in 1741-42.

I recently co-authored an article in Conser- snakes away) at night, releasing crow chicks raised vation International on the demographics of Mariana from eggs produced by both wild and captive parents, Crows. While always pleased to have a paper pub- and shooting and trapping predators. lished in a scientific journal, I was absolutely dismayed But the biggest reason is that I really respect Mari- that in the 15 years since I last studied Mariana Crows, ana Crows as only someone can who has chased them it became officially extirpated from because of for years in tropical jungles of the Western Pacific, the brown tree snake, and declined from 225 known tracking the breeding success (or not) of pairs year- breeding pairs to only 60 on Rota, a tiny island and round. On both Guam and Rota, I staffed field stations the last place on earth these exist in the wild. with up to 8 biologists who, wearing varying amounts The is now red-listed as one of the of camouflage, gave chase to these very smart birds. world’s critically by the Interna- One of the rites of passage for new biologists to the tional Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). islands was to discover that once a crow knew where For any number of reasons, I find this dishearten- you were, their overt behavior was always suspect, de- ing. First, the Mariana Crow is one of almost 17,000 signed to lead you AWAY from the nest, not towards it. species that the IUCN forecasts are likely to go extinct. A trick sometimes used when we were close to an ac- Second, I know how much effort was spent over two tive nest that couldn’t be found was to have two peo- decades to help Mariana Crows survive on Guam, con- ple approach the area, allow the male crow to “lead” structing electric barriers around nest trees (to keep one of the transgressors away from the nest, while the

USFWS Kenai National Wildlife Refuge 23 Refuge Notebook • Vol. 17, No. 12 • March 20, 2015 other person lay in waiting until either the female on ist well with humans. An interesting book entitled “In the nest or the returning male called to the other very the Company of Crows and Ravens” postulates that quietly (more a grunt than a caw), thereby giving away corvids and humans have culturally co-evolved over the location of the nest in a very dense forest canopy. the millennia. Members of the crow family ( or corvids) If you’re interested in corvids, there are many are indeed some of the smartest birds due to their other good contemporary books, mythologies from longevity and high brain-to-body mass ratio that is many cultures, and many excellent poems—“The equal to great apes, whales and dolphins, and almost Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe to name one. The collected that of humans. The , for exam- writings of Peter Kalifornsky has several Kenaitze sto- ple, not only uses sticks as tools to capture grubs, it ries about “Ggugguyni” (raven) and “Gizha” (the camp has been seen making hooks by bending wire! Other robber or gray jay). corvids, such as many crows, magpies and jays, are ex- While corvids on the Kenai are a very long ways cellent mimics. Some species of scrub jays engage in away from being in the same dire straits as Mariana “helping at the nest,” in which young from one brood Crows, disease looms as a concern. When West Nile will help raise a subsequent brood by the same par- Virus first appeared in North America in 1999, this ents. Crows can count to at least seven, and many mosquito-borne virus caused very high rates of mor- corvids have a highly-developed ability to re-locate tality in corvids, killing 5,500 crows during the first cached food items. four months of its introduction. Although it has spread We are lucky here on the Kenai Peninsula. By westward, this virus is still not in Alaska and recent virtue of being at the intersection of the western- research indicates it has mutated to be less lethal to most reach of the boreal forest and the northern-most corvids. reach of the coastal rainforest, we have five corvid species. The , , More locally, abnormalities (such as crossed Gray Jay, Steller’s Jay and Black-billed reside bills) in chickadees and corvids have been studied for year-round. Although I never did quite figure out several years in the Cook Inlet basin by Colleen Han- how many places in North America have five or more del at the USGS Alaska Science Center. While nothing corvids living together, I can tell you that it’s uncom- is conclusive yet, most evidence suggests that environ- mon. mental contaminants such as organochlorines may be Christmas Bird Count data (available online) sug- culpable. gests that statewide winter populations of these five So sit back and really pay attention the next time a species have either remained the same or increased corvid shows up at your feeder. They’re fascinating to over the past 3 or 4 decades despite wide fluctua- watch and we’re unusually blessed with five species. tions. Anecdotally, we’ve seen increases in Steller’s John Morton is the supervisory biologist at Ke- Jay, Northwestern Crow and magpie on the western nai National Wildlife Refuge. Find more informa- side of the Kenai Peninsula in recent times, which may tion at http://www.fws.gov/refuge/kenai/ or http://www. reflect an urbanizing landscape as most corvids coex- facebook.com/kenainationalwildliferefuge.

24 USFWS Kenai National Wildlife Refuge