Crows: Love in the City

There are many romantic things to do in the city of Amsterdam, NY, on Valentine’s Day. You could have dinner at a nice restaurant. Enjoy a hot fudge sundae at Fariello’s. Perhaps even stroll by the river to watch the full moon rising.

Or you could count crows.

Watching big black birds swirling eerily over the city may seem like a pastime better suited to Halloween than Valentine’s Day, but winter is when the crows are in town. On February 14, my husband and I did the dinner and the sundae, but first we shared our Valentine celebration with the crows.

We got to our observation point early, to get a good spot—we drove to the Riverfront Mall and parked in the parking garage, facing south with a good view of the river. Oddly, there were no other crow enthusiasts out—the fact that it was nineteen degrees with a tidy wind-chill might have had something to do with that. Shivering in the car (the heater isn’t working well) we had a front-row seat as we waited for the show to start.

The birds don’t start coming in till just as the sun is kissing the horizon. Then a few early birds flap by, heading for the line of trees bordering the river, where they’ll meet up with a few thousand friends and relatives. Then more and more crows fly in, till there’s a steady stream of black dots overhead.

Last year the crows came in from more or less all directions, but this year by far the most of them came from the west. They followed the Mohawk, flowing through the air like a river of birds above the river of frozen water. The severe cold and snow this winter has made it harder for the crows to find food, so perhaps the chance of gleaning some scraps from the cropfields to the west of Amsterdam lures them out that way—crows will range out about 5-20 miles from their roosting spot to feed during the day, then return to the communal roost at night.

You think you’ve got it bad this winter—at least you don’t have to sleep in a tree, huddling your feathers against the snow and wind. Crows often choose to roost in cities because the human-made buildings block the wind and radiate heat, making the city several degrees warmer than the countryside.

As the dark deepened, the crows became harder and harder to see, like flakes of ash against a gray sky. We kept counting, timing them in batches—approximately 20 crows a second flew overhead. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, two hundred. Twenty…and so forth.  At a very conservative estimate, twenty thousand crows flew by on that cold Valentine’s Night.

Then it was time for dinner and a hot fudge sundae.