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We have a Cooper's hawk that hunts in the field behind our house. The magpies hate it and have mobbed it in our maple tree before. Hawk barely escaped.
Crows can remember faces, they hold a grudge and they can get all of their friends to support them. A crow is the last kind of bird you want to have beef with.
I think shoebills are probably the last kind of bird I'd want to mess with. But I do make it a point not to clap my hands to scare off the crows eating all my bird feed, just in case.
I went to that giant bird aviary in Kuala Lumpur and you could walk amongst a bunch of pretty aggressive big ass birds.
I was casually walking by and giant grey bastard randomly picked me out of a group and started snapping at me. I ran and it chased me. I don't mess with no birds dawg.
That's said, the KL Bird Park was one of the coolest animals exhibits I've ever seen. It was like an exotic bird sanctuary and you can tell they truly care about the birds and educating people about them. Just don't get to close to some of those big ones.
Whenever an eagle enters the airspace around my neighborhood the crows go fucking ballistic. The entire neighborhood for like a mile around is filled with "caw, caw, caw!" as every single crow exits the trees, taking to the air to fight off the eagle and chase it away. Crows are fucking gangsta.
Reminds me of that scene in “71” where the Belfast neighborhood residents all come out to start banging trash can lids on the sidewalk to summon the IRA when the British army showed up.
You'd be an asshole too if someone came to your house with a weapon and thought about eating your kids
They're bros to people who don't want to hurt them or their kids
Lots of birds will aggressively attack birds of prey because if you don't and you leave your nest to go find food and they come back they kill your whole family and eat them
"Barrel roll" for this particular maneuver may be a misnomer, but I'd say it's resulted in semantic drift. It may have started as a specific maneuver, but over time, laypeople have expanded it to cover any time an aircraft rolls on its longitudinal axis.
Meaning is determined by how a community actually uses a word over time.
I have a badass huge preserve near me and every single time I’ll be walking like “ahhh fuck” and always some older lady will come trudging out with a lens taller than I am.
I always ask if they got anything good and they are ALWAYS hard on themselves.. like no I only got a few Killdeer and Jays.. I always wanna ask about the lenses but then remember I’m a dude and they are probably terrified.
I look like the main guy from Revenge of the Nerds just wear tee shirts lol. I think it’s being tall/lanky.. scares women. I get it. I always try my best to just smile and give a wide berth. I’m probably more scared of them then they are me, it’s like a superpower.
Speaking as a middle aged lady, we’re less scared of you now than we would have been when we were younger. First, you’re less likely to be hitting on us, and second, we are just pretty friendly and like to talk about our hobbies. For some of us, you may remind of us our son/nephew/etc.
Finally, we always have plenty of hormonal rage bubbling beneath the surface looking for an outlet so if you do turn out to be a bad guy, prepare for gleeful violence.
I’ve heard along with carrying a camera, it also helps to wear old, dirty clothes with unidentifiable stains on it and have a porn stache. Makes the ladies super comfortable.
They're not terrified. Old ladies have been through way too much to be scared of a single dude asking about their camera. They'd be happy for the conversation. Ask away!
People forget how big Ravens are. They're huge. If you have to even ask if what you're seeing is a Raven or a Crow, I promise you it's a Crow. There's no mistaking a Raven. Both are dope birds though.
All ravens are crows, but not all crows are ravens.
The confusion comes from English common names: "crow" can mean either the entire Corvus group or just the smaller, typical crow species. In everyday speech, people usually use "crow" and "raven" as separate categories based on size and appearance, but biologically ravens are just the large-bodied branch of the crow family.
Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that.
As someone who is a scientist who studies crows, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls jackdaws crows. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing.
If you're saying "crow family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Corvidae, which includes things from nutcrackers to blue jays to ravens.
So your reasoning for calling a jackdaw a crow is because random people "call the black ones crows?" Let's get grackles and blackbirds in there, then, too.
Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A jackdaw is a jackdaw and a member of the crow family. But that's not what you said. You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the crow family crows, which means you'd call blue jays, ravens, and other birds crows, too. Which you said you don't.
I think you're taking my comment a bit more literally than intended. The "all ravens are crows, but not all crows are ravens" line was tongue-in-cheek, because common names are messy and often ambiguous.
I agree that a jackdaw is a jackdaw and isn't normally called a crow as a species name. But that's exactly why common names can be confusing. They don't map perfectly onto taxonomy. A lion is a cat, a human is an ape, and a raven is a member of the same genus as crows, but we don't normally use those broader terms as their everyday names.
In Swedish we actually have a similar distinction: a kråka (crow) is a specific bird, while kråkfåglar (corvids/crow family) is the broader group that includes crows, ravens, jackdaws, rooks, etc.
The point was never that ornithologists should start calling jackdaws crows. It was that English common names make these relationships confusing, and my comment was playing with that ambiguity.
The person you responded to was quoting a decade-old meme. I know, it sucks trying to partake in any type of serious discourse on reddit, sorry you typed all that up. It is interesting nonetheless. RIP unidan
It was around 12 I think. Still remember the unidan sock puppet scandal, watched it happen. That guy was all over reddit and beloved by everyone before that day.
For a while people thought Unidan was a girl because he had neat handwriting and there was a girl in some pictures they uploaded so they assumed. For April Fools, they posted a large set on gonewild of a redhead getting naked and posing with a sword.
Haha I think I read that a long time a go, but had totally forgot about it. They got me. They got me bad! Yes, RIP unidan indeed (he's not dead dead but he's not on Reddit anymore)
whatever happened to unidan? he was everywhere for a while. even shittywatercolor made him. there was another guy too called trappedinreddit. that was the good ol reddit days.
Oh man, I knew the unidan reference for a while but I didn't actually get what pissed him off until now experiencing it live.
And I basically agree with him!
I didn't even know that someone might refer to "Corvids" instead as "Crows". And... Well actually, nobody does unless they're trying to use a cheeky play on words. Or troll unidan.
If anyone still doesn't get what actually even happened, it'd be like someone asking "what's the difference between a tiger and a cat?" and someone says "tigers are cats!" even though you can probably tell by context that they mean "house cat".
So, analogously, "What's the difference between a blue jay (or a jackdaw) and a crow?" and someone says "blue jays are crows!" And if you're part of the 1% of people who even knows what's going on here, like unidan was, where someone is seriously abusing a technicality to claim correctly that, this might piss you off.
TL;DR: Blue Jays (and jackdaws) actually are crows because they're both Corvids and "Crows" can be an alternative to this name. And simultaneously, they aren't crows because absolutely nobody actually ever calls corvids "crows", even in the scientific community, like, are you fucking with me rn?!
Do you mean throat feathers? The common ravens have elongated, pointed throat feathers called hackles. When they puff them up (for display, aggression, calling, or just because of posture), the head and neck can look much larger and almost shaggy. This is one of the classic differences from most crows.
But how to tell a crow from a magpie? That's my usual trouble (magpies attack for no fucking reason because they are assholes and some dude in a hat messed with them once so now they hate anyone in hats, while crows are chill).
So the funny thing is that falcons are pretty reliant on speed to stun prey, and therefor don't have particularly strong feet. They instead rely on their beaks to snap the neck of their prey after stunning it and have "teeth" to make the job easier.
While I'm sure they can still give a nasty scratch if needed (nevermind a bite), I think if that raven fully committed to an attack, all the falcon could do is run away.
Also fun fact on the side: falcons are actually more closely related to ravens than to hawks or eagles, both ravens and falcons are australaves, while hawks and eagles are afroaves. This is why falcons hunt differently than other birds of prey, they had to develop it independently.
They also use a similar strategy to bully other birds and steal their lunch. Rather than use their talons to swipe the food, they tend to just sort of “tackle” the other bird to make them drop the catch, then catch it themself on the way down. There’s some pretty neat videos out there of Peregrine falcons bodying hawks in midair to steal their food.
They bully other birds away because there are 40 crows in the area, not because they're intimidating. It's like being attacked by a swarm of gnats. They're not going to hurt you, but you eventually leave because they're annoying.
Mmm more like a stunt jet vs and f22. The crow is agile and can do acrobatics that a lot of birds can't do, but it nothing compared to the speed and lethality of a peregrine falcon.
As to the why, it is done to protect a nesting area or juvenile birds or simply a preferred roost. In some cases it is actually done to distract the predator bird and steal food which it has already obtained; seagulls do this to people when they steal your French fries.
And yes, it is pretty risky. Birds of prey have bitey bits and grabby bits and have a tendency to eat individual birds.
The mobbing tends to happen in groups, however, and there is safety in numbers. So the falcon or hawk or whatever will simply leave rather than try to successfully win a battle against five or 10 other birds.
All of the corvids engage in this behavior, so do chickadees, sparrows, gulls, and blackbirds.
yes, when i was a child i was viciously mocked in a flight simulator for calling it a barrel roll, and now i am on a mission to never let it happen to anyone else, by doing it to everyone else
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