Crow roads
Several corvid species form impressive flocks in winter – see if you can find one.
COMMON Starlings are renowned for their huge communal roosts, but there are many other species which also form spectacularly large evening gatherings. Communal roosts are usually at their biggest in winter, making January a good time to experience one. Roosting communally helps birds stay safe and warm and may also act as an information exchange.
Members of the crow family are often gregarious and many of them form winter roosts, some of them very impressive. Birds gather from the surrounding countryside, travelling many miles between feeding and roosting areas. December and January are often the best times to see them as many will start to disperse to their breeding areas in February.
Rooks, which breed communally, can form very large roosts and the largest is at Buckenham Fen, Norfolk, where tens of thousands can be seen on a winter evening, with perhaps as many as 80,000 in exceptional winters. Carrion Crows, Rooks and Jackdaws often roost together and one roost in Cornwall in the 1960s contained an incredible 200 Carrion Crows, 2,500
Rooks and 7,600 Jackdaws! At Newborough in Anglesey there is a Raven roost which numbers more than 1,500 birds. In the US, the American Crow has formed roosts in Oklahoma and Kansas which number several million. Why not find your own roost? Watch out as dusk arrives and look for numbers of crows heading in a particular direction. A roost may contain birds from across 50-80 sq km of countryside, coming in from many different directions. As they tend to fly in a straight line to a roost, make a note of where you see them and the direction in which they are going. Watch from a different vantage point on another evening, and using a map, try to find the place where the flight lines approximately join. Heading to that spot should reveal the roost. Birds can continue to arrive quite late so always wait as long as possible when doing a count.