1 8 Birds of Buzzard's Roost 



The range of the American crow extends from northern 

 Mexico to the Artie regions. It is recorded that in the bleak 

 interior of Greenland, five hundred miles northeast of Jacob's 

 Haven, Lieutenant Hallerman saw a mountain range swarm- 

 ing with crows, and that they seemed to subsist on lemming 

 rats, their only fellow inhabitants of those treeless solitudes. 

 They have been known to breed within the Arctic Circle. They 

 do not migrate in the true sense of that term. They are partially 

 gregarious in their habits. In October and November they 

 collect into what are called roosts and in March they break 

 up and separate into small colonies. The following is a 

 graphic account of one of these roosts near Indianapolis, 

 written by my friend, George S. Cottman. He says, "By four 

 o'clock in the afternoon the crows began to come in from every 

 point of the compass ; straggling at first, then in flocks that 

 increased in number and size till continuous streams seem 

 to be converging at this point, and the air overhead was fairly 

 filled with a chaos of black flakes soaring and circling about. 

 Evidently they came together for the purpose of enjoying a 

 grand social carnival. They congregated in the adjoining 

 meadows in vast crowds, where they walked about interming- 

 ling and hob-nobbing; the rail fences presented long, unbroken 

 lines of black, and the isolated trees in the fields seemed sud- 

 denly to have taken on some strange, large-leaved foliage. 

 When the multitude took alarm and all arose at once, they 

 were like the famous cloud of locusts, and it looked as if a 

 rifle-ball fired at random would bring down a score. As one 

 stood in the woods the spectacle of these thousands of birds 

 swirling and eddying among the tree-tops had a bewildering 

 effect, which was heightened by the incessant clamor. Free 

 speech seemed to be the order of the occasion. Every crow had 

 something to say, and he said it, and as no individual could be 

 heard for the others, the result was a conglomeration of 

 noises that could be heard a mile, and which sounded precisely 

 like a tremendous escape of steam. The jollification continued 

 till long after dark, and all through the evening they kept up a 

 boisterous, many-voiced conversation." As soon as it is 

 light in the morning, they depart in every direction to their 

 feeding grounds, and sometimes these are many miles away. 



