Re: Interesting crow behavior

["Patrick Norton" <ptnorton@email.msn.com>]

<While we were eating the remains of our lunches, a crow perched near us,
looked us up and down as they are wont to do, and proceeded to hop over to
various rocks, tip them over, extract crackers and cookies that it had
obviously hidden there, and eat them, cawing derisively all the time.  I
guess it showed us late-coming upstart mammalian species!>

For others interested in recent studies on _Corvus_ behavior, particularly
the Raven (C. corax), I highly recommend "Mind of the Raven" by Bernd
Heinrich (Harper-Collins, 1999). An enjoyable book, with extensive
references.  Heinrich is a biology professor at the University of Vermont
who has published extensively on Corvus behavior and wrote an earlier book
on this topic titled "Ravens in Winter".

PS: The crow is _Corvus brachyrynchos_.