Crows are officially worse than crows, report of citizen scientists



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Battle of the Birbs
Graphic: Ryan F. Mandelbaum; Raven: Wikimedia user CanadianWikilover; Crow: user of Wikimedia Mdf; Sky: User of Wikimedia Mohammed Tawsif Salam, screenshot via Nintendo (Wikimedia Commons)

Crows and crows are hard to tell, but deep down, the common crow is bigger than the American raven and the crow. North West. So, you might think that crows would win in a fight. But that does not seem to be the case.

One thing you may not know about birds is that many of us are citizen scientists, recording all the birds we see, with our observations, in an online database called eBird. This is a worthwhile effort that can lead to new scientific knowledge about birds. Two corpuscles and crows are incredibly intelligent species, but our cities and agricultural areas are largely dominated by crows, while crows live in wilder areas. Study author, Benjamin Freeman, postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia, told Gizmodo. "The social behavior of crows helps them keep their dominance in cities and agricultural areas."

Basically, the raven, being a big cousin of the raven, would probably win in a one-on-one fight, but such events rarely occur in nature, said Freeman. Instead, crows gather in small groups to hunt and attack crows – 97% of the time, crows are the aggressors, according to the article published in The Auk Ornithological Advances . These attacks occur more frequently during the crows' nesting season or in winter, which means that crows could prevent larger potential predators or fight for resources such as food.

It will not surprise you if you have ever seen crows – they tend to join forces and catch big scary animals, including hawks. Ornithological anecdotes alone are not scientific advances, however, someone really needed to crunch the data. Freeman and co-author Eliot Miller of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology badyzed 2,000 eBird observations that mentioned the attack between crows and crows across the United States and Canada.

An observation of Acadia National Park in Maine noted that "Raven was badaulted by four crows, an attack jet of 360 on the road! Gluck-gluck calling all the way. It's a hard time for Raven. "

And another, from York County, Pennsylvania:" I just watched 4 Ravens harbad and then hunt a raven from a tree and escort it. Very close. Raven made some very strange noises. Also observed by another Roundtop employee. Very cool! "

Of course, a limitation of the study is that science is as good as data, and these data points are only as reliable as the birders who submitted them, it's possible that" a person confuses a raven for a raven, for example, but it would be almost impossible to do this kind of study on the whole continent otherwise, said Freeman.And people who use eBird are usually a little aware of the birds

In any case, you sometimes hear about citizen science projects that seem a bit of a gimmick, but there is a lot of real scientific progress that can be made when many people work together to make a difference. As the document says, "This study is an example of how citizen scientists can contribute to the study of behavioral interactions of birds at the continental scale." ornithologists.

[The Auk Ornithological Advances]

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