I appreciate your comment that you don't remember seeing crows 35 years ago. I also live in California in the San Francisco Bay Area. I moved to Alameda in 1988 and don't remember seeing crows then. But a few years later I remember hearing a loud racket and walking out my front door to see what it was. I looked down the street and there were at least 15 or 20 crows in a tree. That was the first time I recall seeing them in the neighborhood. Slowly the population has grown over the years. Where did they come from? How much has the overall crow population increased over the past three decades?