WINTER ROOSTING COLONIES OF CROWS. 337 



fermentation, must also tend to increase the warmth of the 

 roost." 



But among those which have settled upon the perches there 

 is a good deal of " cawing," which may serve to guide to the 

 roost their fellows belated in the dark or storm. At times, if 

 unusually disturbed, instead of remaining upon the trees they 

 will fly back and forth, and high into the air, making considerable 

 noise. Those coming in sometimes answer this signalling, espe- 

 cially if, as I witnessed in the case of a heavy snowstorm in 

 December, 1887, they may have cause to be confused. As they 

 appear suddenly from out of the distant darkness, or from the 

 thickest of the swirling snow, a spectre procession without 

 beginning and without end, one is haunted by the weird reality 

 of the ghostly scene. We seem to be looking at Poe's "Raven" 

 and all its earthly relations, coming as mysteriously as did that 

 uncanny guest, in a series that shall end " nevermore ! " 



This body, however, is but one branch of what we must now 

 compare to a vast army of Crows. And as this division is 

 marshalled into camp, from at least two other directions great 

 bodies are coming in streams, settling down upon the trees or 

 flying high above them, outlined against the red after-glow of the 

 sun. The air, as far as one can see toward the west, seems 

 literally alive with Crows. It is as if one of those huge swarms 

 of gnats which we are all familiar with in the summer sunshine 

 had been magnified until each individual gnat was as large as a 

 crow, without any diminution in the total number of individuals. 



In the winter of 1886-87, as one of a party from Baltimore, 

 I saw one of these vast divisions coming in for the night with 

 singular regularity. It came from the north-east, and as it 

 approached our point of observation was somewhat hidden by a 

 clump of trees, until, within a hundred yards of us, the procession 

 made a sharp bend, and the Crows were directly over the woods 

 which constituted the roost. If you will imagine a river one 

 hundred and fifty feet wide and about thirty feet deep, its end a 

 huge cataract by which the water falls to lose itself in a large 

 lake, its beginning farther away than the eye can see, and if 

 instead of water you will make this river of Crows not so closely 

 packed but that they can fly easily, and make the swiftness of the 

 current equal to the ordinary flight of the Crow, you may gain 

 some idea of the stream which our party watched for over an 



ZOOLOGIST. SEPT. 1888. 2 D 



