Anne

I live in a very developed suburban community in Southern California, however my immediate neighborhood is an equestrian community and therefore the homes are on large lots (by California standards) and have more open land around them.  I keep horses on my property and I often get to watch the crows going about their business as I care for my horses.  From my barn I can see them raiding the dumpster behind the restaurant across the street and then flying by with whatever they have scavenged, including pieces of meat and bread.  They often come to my horse's water troughs to drink.  Every couple months I will find a half eaten chicken leg or equivalent in a water trough complete with seasoning around the edges.  It might not be the crows dropping their dinner by accident, but they seem a likely source.    My crows also absolutely LOVE to eat my elderly horse's lunch bucket, which consists of soaked alfalfa pellets, rice bran, and beat pulp.  I try not to let them get much of this because it also contains horse medications that are probably not good for the crows, but if I turn my back for a minute the crows will take the opportunity to hop in to my horse's stall and grab a few bites.   They will also forage around in the horse manure in the paddocks, actually breaking open the balls of manure to find grubs or whatever might be in them. My neighborhood also has a lot of fruit trees in people's yards and the crows enjoy the various citrus and other fruit.  In my own yard the mandarins and pears are particular favorites of the crows.  We get a pretty good crop each year so we don't mind sharing with them.  They also forage under my bird feeders where they will find assorted things including dried meal worms and shelled sunflower seeds. There was a time last year when we would have a handful of crows under the feeder and one of them would fly up and ram his body into the feeder which would knock a bunch of food on to the ground where they could get at it.  I thought that was pretty clever!  This only went on for a couple weeks, though, and then they stopped doing this and just went back to picking up the scraps that were dropped by the house finches and blue birds. I have no idea where my crows nest, but after taking this course I am really curious and plan to go looking around the neighborhood.  We have a good number of big trees any of which are possibilities. As far as what people think about them, in my experience most suburbanites don't even notice them.  We don't live very close to the land anymore and it makes me sad that so many people are unaware of such amazing creatures living with us everyday.