Hi Everybody!!
I have a real treat for You tonight: 3 Crows in the nest! This is a feast for the eyes and NO, we will not be eating crow here. People in the past have eaten crow and in some cultures, they still do. I was a Chef in Texas and never prepared a crow. I have shared info below about all you ever need to know about "eating crow" (thanks to Wikipedia).
The feature attraction with these crows is last day in the nest. Tomorrow they fledge! Your photostudy is from my rooftop deck and linked to the G+ Photo Albums Enjoy!

I am on my rooftop deck looking at the crow's nest

I have circled the nest with an "O"

Zooming the camera more, you can see one of the black birds.

It is a very big nest (compared to songbirds)

The complete photostudy is in my G+ Albums at this link: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/117645114459863049265/albums/6018826072847015649

Look how cute the 3 babies are!

Quick Clips by Auto Awesome at G+

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fledge

Fledge

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fledge is the stage in a young bird's life when the feathers and wing muscles are sufficiently developed for flight. It also describes the act of a chick's parents raising it to a fully grown state. A young bird that has recently fledged but is still dependent upon parental care and feeding is called a fledgling.

In ornithology, the meaning of fledging varies, depending on species. Birds are sometimes considered fledged once they leave the nest, even if they still cannot fly.^{[citation needed]} Some definitions of fledge take it to mean the independence of the chick from the adults. Adults will often continue to feed the chick after it has left the nest and is able to fly.

They are ready to go. Tomorrow is the big day!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow

Crows (/kroʊ/) are members of a widely distributed genus of birds, Corvus, in the family Corvidae. Ranging in size from the relatively small pigeon-size jackdaws(Eurasian and Daurian) to the Common Raven of the Holarctic region and Thick-billed Raven of the highlands of Ethiopia, the 40 or so members of this genus occur on all temperate continents except South America, and several islands. In Europe, the word "crow" is used to refer to the Carrion Crow or the Hooded Crow, while in North America it is used for the American Crow or the Northwestern Crow.

The crow genus makes up a third of the species in the Corvidae family. Crows appear to have evolved in Asia from the corvid stock, which had evolved in Australia. The collective name for a group of crows is a flock or a murder.^[1]

Recent research has found some crow species capable of not only tool use but also tool construction.^[2] Crows are now considered to be among the world's mostintelligent animals^[3] with an encephalization quotient approaching that of some apes^{[citation needed]}.

Crow

American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos)
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Passeriformes
Family:	Corvidae
Genus:	Corvus Linnaeus, 1758

Behavior[edit]

Play[edit]

There are countless recorded incidents of crows at play. Many behaviourists see play as an essential quality in intelligent animals.^[7]

Calls

Crows make a wide variety of calls or vocalizations. Crows have also been observed to respond to calls of other species; presumably, this behavior is learned because it varies regionally. Crows' vocalizations are complex and poorly understood. Some of the many vocalizations that crows make are a "Koww", usually echoed back and forth between birds; a series of "Kowws" in discrete units; a long caw followed by a series of short caws (usually made when a bird takes off from a perch); an echo-like "eh-aw" sound; and more. These vocalizations vary by species, and within each species they vary regionally. In many species, the pattern and number of the numerous vocalizations have been observed to change in response to events in the surroundings (e.g. arrival or departure of crows).

Intelligence[edit]

As a group, crows show remarkable examples of intelligence. Natural history books from the 18th century recount an often-repeated, but unproven anecdote of "counting crows" — specifically a crow whose ability to count to five (or four in some versions) is established through a logic trap set by a farmer.^[8]^[9] Crows and ravens often score very highly on intelligence tests. Certain species top the avian IQ scale.^[10] Wild hooded crows in Israel have learned to use bread crumbs for bait-fishing.^[11] Crows will engage in a kind of mid-air jousting, or air-"chicken" to establish pecking order. Crows have been found to engage in feats such as sports,^[12] tool use, the ability to hide and store food across seasons,episodic-like memory, and the ability to use individual experience in predicting the behavior of environmental conspecifics.^[13]

One species, the New Caledonian Crow, has also been intensively studied recently because of its ability to manufacture and use tools in the day-to-day search for food. On 5 October 2007, researchers from the University of Oxford, England, presented data acquired by mounting tiny video cameras on the tails of New Caledonian Crows. They pluck, smooth and bend twigs and grass stems to procure a variety of foodstuffs.^[14]^[15] Crows in Queensland, Australia, have learned how to eat the toxic cane toad by flipping the cane toad on its back and violently stabbing the throat where the skin is thinner, allowing the crow to access the non-toxic innards; their long beaks ensure that all of the innards can be removed.^[16]^[17]

The Jackdaw and the European Magpie have been found to have a nidopallium approximately the same relative size as the functionally equivalent neocortex in chimpanzees and humans, and significantly larger than is found in the gibbon.^[18]

Crows have demonstrated the ability to distinguish individual humans by recognizing facial features.^[19]

Evidence also suggests that they are one of the few non-human animals capable of displacement (linguistics)(communicating about things that are happening in a different spatial or temporal location to the here and now).^[20]^[21]

Diet[edit]

Crows are omnivorous, and their diet is very diverse. They will eat almost anything, including other birds, fruits, nuts, mollusks, earthworms, seeds, frogs, eggs, nestlings, mice and carrion. The origin of placing scarecrows in grain fields resulted from the crow’s incessant damaging and scavenging, although crows assist farmers by eating insects otherwise attracted to their crops.^[22]

Life span and disease[edit]

Crows reach sexual maturity around the age of 3 years for females and 5 years for males. Some crows may live to the age of 20, and the oldest known American crow in the wild was almost 30 years old.^[23] The oldest captive crow documented died at age 59.^[24]

The American crow is highly susceptible to the recently introduced North American strain of West Nile virus.^[25] American crows typically die within one week of acquiring the disease and very few survive exposure.

Conservation status[edit]

The Hawaiian Crow or ʻalala(Corvus hawaiiensis) is nearly extinct; only a few dozen birds survive in captivity. It is listed as "extinct in the wild" by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

Two species of crow have been listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: The Hawaiian Crow and the Mariana Crow.^[26] The American Crow, despite having its population reduced by 45% since 1999 by the West Nile Virus, is considered a Species of Least Concern.

Hunting[edit]

Even though crows are protected under the Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, hunting is allowed under state and federal regulation. Crow hunting is considered a sport in rural areas of the U.S. because the birds are not considered a tasty traditional game species. Some cultures do treat various Corvid species as a food source.^[29] Liability and possible danger to persons and property limit the use of hunting or shooting as control methods in urban areas. Crows' wariness and cunning make it difficult to harvest crows in sufficient numbers.

As a food supplement[edit]

Crows were hunted for survival by Curonians, a Baltic tribe,^[33] when common food was exhausted and the landscape changed so that farming was not as productive during the 18th and 19th centuries. Fishermen supplemented their diet by gathering coastal bird eggs and preserving crow meat by salting and smoking it. It became a traditional food for poor folk and is documented in a poem, The Seasons by K. Donelaitis. After the non-hunting policy was lifted by the Prussian government in 1721–24 and alternative food supplies increased, the practice was forgotten. The tradition reemerged after World War I; in marketplaces, it was common to find butchered crows which were sought after and bought by townsfolk. The hunted crows were not the local, but the migrating ones; each year during the spring and autumn crows migrated via the Curonian Spit between Finland and the rest of Europe. In 1943, the government even issued a hunting quota for such activities. Crows were usually caught by attracting them with smoked fish or grains soaked in spirits and then collecting them with nets. It was a job for the elderly or young who were unable to go to sea to fish, and it was common to catch 150 to 200 birds during a hunting day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_crow

Eating crow

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eating crow is an American colloquial idiom,^[1] meaning humiliation by admitting wrongness or having been proved wrong after taking a strong position.^[2] Crow is presumably foul-tasting in the same way that being proved wrong might be emotionally hard to swallow.^[2] The exact origin of the idiom is unknown, but it probably began with an American story published around 1850 about a slow-witted New York farmer.^[3] Eating crow is of a family of idioms having to do with eating and being proved incorrect, such as to "eat dirt" and to "eat your hat" (or shoe), all probably originating from "to eat one's words", which first appears in print in 1571 in one of John Calvin's tracts, on Psalm 62: “God eateth not his words when he hath once spoken”.^[2]

Origin theories[edit]

Literally eating a crow is traditionally seen as being distasteful; the crow is one of the birds listed in Leviticus chapter 11^[4] as being unfit for eating. Scavenging carrion eaters have a long association with the battlefield, "They left the corpses behind for the raven, never was there greater slaughter in this island," says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Along withbuzzards, rats, and other carrion-eating scavenging animals, there is a tradition in Western culture going back to at least the Middle Ages of seeing them as distasteful (even illegal at times) to eat,^[5] and thus naturally humiliating if forced to consume against one's will.^[2]

In the modern figurative sense of being proven wrong, eating crow probably first appeared in print in 1850, as an American humor piece about a rube farmer near Lake Mahopack, New York.^[3] The OED V2 says the story was first published as "Eating Crow" in San Francisco's Daily Evening Picayune (Dec. 3, 1851),^[1] but two other early versions exist, one in The Knickerbocker (date unknown),^[3] and one in the Saturday Evening Post (Nov. 2, 1850) called "Can You Eat Crow?".^[3] All tell a similar story: a slow-witted New York farmer is outfoxed by his (presumed urban)^[3] boarders; after they complain about the poor food being served, the farmer discounts the complaint by claiming he "kin eat anything", and the boarders wonder if he can eat a crow. "I kin eat a crow!" the farmer says. The boarders take him up on the challenge but also secretly spike the crow with Scotch snuff. The story ends with the farmer saying: "I kin eat a crow, but I be darned if I hanker after it."^[3] Although the humor might produce a weak smile today, it was probably a knee slapper by 19th century standards, guaranteeing the story would be often retold in print and word of mouth, thus explaining, in part, the idiom's origin.^[3] In 1854 Samuel Putnam Avery published a version called "Crow Eating" in his collection Mrs. Parkington's Carpet-Bag of Fun.^[6]

A similar British idiom is to eat humble pie.^[2] The English phrase is something of a pun—"umbles" were the intestines, offal and other less valued meats of a deer. Pies made of this were known to be served to those of lesser class who did not eat at the king's/lord's/governor's table. Another dish likely to be served with humble pie is rook pie (rooks being closely related to crows). "Pie" is also an antiquated term for the European Magpie,^[7] a type of crow. There is a similarity with the American version of "umble", since the Oxford English Dictionary defines crow (sb3) as meaning "intestine or mesentery of an animal" and cites usages from the 17th century into the 19th century (e.g., Farley, Lond Art of Cookery: "the harslet, which consists of the liver, crow, kidneys, and skirts)."^[8]

Notable examples of use[edit]

The following examples illustrate notable uses of the idiom after its origin in the 1850s.

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) used this concept as a central metaphor in his short story "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes" (1885). Morrowbie Jukes, a European colonist in India, falls into a sand-pit from which he cannot escape. Another man, a native Indian, is also trapped there who catches wild crows and eats them, but Morrowbie in his pride declares, "I shall never eat crow!" After days of nothing to eat, his hunger and desperation finally force him to do what he swore he would never do: literally eat crow.^[9]

After incumbent Harry Truman defeated Thomas Dewey in the 1948 United States presidential election despite many media predictions of a Dewey victory, the Washington Post sent a telegram to the victor:

You Are Hereby Invited To A "Crow Banquet" To Which This Newspaper Proposes To Invite Newspaper Editorial Writers, Political Reporters And Editors, Including Our Own, Along With Pollsters, Radio Commentators And Columnists . . . Main Course Will Consist Of Breast Of Tough Old Crow En Glace. (You Will Eat Turkey.)^[10]