Swooping crows plague Australians

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November 25, 2016

Crows have been increasingly swooping at Australian passersby, and an ecologist says they could have picked up the behavior.

“I think they’re learning exactly what the magpies are doing,” Dr. Darryl Jones, a Griffith University behavioral ecologist, tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Australian magpies (Cracticus tibicen) are the usual perpetrators, and Jones believes the crows may be mimicking their behavior to protect their young. The incidents should soon slow down since crows raise their young for three weeks in the spring.

Mental Floss suggests the attacks could be a result of urban development, which is similar to a recent study that shows city sparrows are more territorial than rural dwellers.

“As an animal, if you can overcome the issue of not being scared of people all the time, you’ve got heaps of food around,” Jones says. “They’re slowly, slowly becoming what’s known as ‘habituated’ to people and they’ve lost their fear. As soon as you lose your fear, you don’t mind swooping people.”

Crows are intelligent and can learn to count, talk, solve puzzles, and create and use tools to solve problems. Researchers also say the birds can recognize and remember individual human faces.

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