In the sky over the rush-hour congestion on Manheim Pike, they take on the grandeur of a natural event, just beyond the range of dashboard and light pole, of golden arches and Coca Cola bottling plant. It was only after I began commuting to my present job that I took notice of this nightly gathering of murders (murder of murders? mass murder?) of American crows during the winter. Until then, I had always backgrounded the crows into the urban tapestry, with the squirrels and sparrows and gingko trees.

Each individual crow flies in an idiosyncratic manner, in its own space; some stop, either as individuals or in small groups, stubborn to leave certain tall trees. Others fly against the great current of wings, or obliquely to it. Some of the birds caw out while others fly in observant silence. Heads swiveling, they scan the landscape. But the shape of all of them together moves purposefully in one direction.

Last winter, I decided to check it out, to follow them. I got my family and we got in the car and we . . . we went to the mall?

By the tens of thousands, the crows congregate at Park City Center, the shopping mall outside of Lancaster city, saturating tree branches like ripe fruits out of season. The sound of so many crow voices manifests as a cyclorama of guttural cries. Periodically and without any warning, an enormous matte black cloud of them billows into the sky; descending once again, the cloud precipitates individual birds that strut across the parking lot, some climbing over the plow-compacted mountains of snow. As the sun sets and the temperature plummets further, more and more of them arrive. From their perches around the mall’s periphery—on the treetops and snow mountains and ornamentals—they move in closer, roosting on the roofs of the department stores themselves, their forms silhouetted against the orange glow in the west.

And so the activity of “doing crow stuff” was born. I find the experience sublime. I imagine it to be something like the running of the bison or caribou in times long past and places remote; instead of the thunder of hooves, the cacophony of crow vocalizations forces me to recognize animal control of the space. Although I’ve read that they sometimes prey on the nests of songbirds, I sense only a sort of crafty benignness on the part of crows. That the roost happens nightly for months makes it even more impressive. How do they all know? How do they share their plans?

What I found out was that, strangely enough, the large urban winter crow roost is a relatively new development in the long history of human-crow entanglement. In a short time, the phenomenon has spread across the country: crows gather in huge winter roosts from Portland, Oregon to Auburn, New York and beyond, and many places in between. No one knows exactly why, either. Although crows and humans have since the beginning of human civilization contested the same food supply, as I detail below, “Food supply . . . can not explain why, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, towns and cities began to harbor large winter roosts of crows” (Gade 164). If these roosts started around mid-century, then, “by the 1970s there were regular reports of large urban roosts.” Their focus on this area came even later, as Cornell ornithologist Kevin McGowan told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2016: “Crows have been gathering in large flocks in southern Pennsylvania for hundreds of years, but have been roosting in cities just in recent decades.”

When they found Lancaster, their initial reception by humans was . . . unfriendly. The recent history of this midsize central Pennsylvania city and its corvid guests—some locals, many thousands more migratory—shows how out of sync we are with even the part of the “natural” world that comes more than halfway to meet us. It also shows that change is not a thing that will be coming but rather a thing that is very much happening. Finally, it shows that we are not mentally prepared for kind of the future we may be arriving at.

Y2Krow

The exact evening on which the crows first darkened the skies over Park City Center is lost to time. It happened in the 1990s, maybe even as late as 1999. “No one is sure why the crows have flocked to Park City,” a January 2000 article reported, “pecking through the huge complex’s roof and roosting in surrounding trees and on the sea of parking pavement.” A 2008 article in a local paper said, “Crow problems in the county escalated in the late 1990s when thousands of the birds began roosting around Park City Center.” The same year, an article by researchers from USDA Wildlife Services acknowledged that the Lancaster area has hosted large rural winter crow roosts since at least the Civil War era, but pegged the beginning of the local urban roost to sometime in the 1990s (Avery et al).

Over the years, the size of Lancaster’s roost has been reported as 40,000, 50,000, 60,000, even 100,000 crows. That last figure would put it in the top three on the entire continent—in a 2010 paper by geography professor Daniel W. Gade, the seven largest roosts were Chatham, Ontario (250,000); Lancaster; Springfield, Ohio (100,000); Danville, Illinois (90,000); Auburn, New York (75,000); Hagerstown, Maryland (75,000); and Terre Haute, Indiana (58,000) (Gade 165). (Note that all of these are mid-size cities: one theory is that the crows like the protection of streetlights at night combined with a short flight to the fields in the morning.) More recent data on the roost size is unavailable. Moreover, the crows’ shifting preferences may make these rankings fluid. Even now, they are finding Portland, Oregon to be THE place to go.

First, a Defense of Crows

Like people, crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) socially discover new things. They “innovate, and learn from observing their parents and peers” (Marzluff and Angell 71). Crows are trendspotters and, as some experts argue, #influencers as well: “. . . crows grace logos, stimulate hunters, poets, and artists, enrich our language and place names, and take lead roles in print and film. . . . It appears that our perceptions of crows affect culture today, just as our experience with crows affected culture in the past” (Marzluff and Angell 72).

It is now accepted that, far from being a mere agricultural pest, crows actually resemble us more than we may recognize when we see only feathers and beaks. “Living in close social groups and striving within these groups to find food and secure bodily safety in the face of similar social and ecological challenges have led us [both] to develop the same complex cognitive pathways,” Lyanda Lynn Haupt writes in The Urban Bestiary (232). Like us, crows exhibit causal reasoning, “the ability to generate rules from past experiences,” imagination, and “the ability to imagine future events” (233). They are intelligent and demonstrate this fact in various ways. Personally, what I find striking about crow behavior is how obvious it is that they know how to enjoy their leisure time. One morning, while walking the dog, I observed them chasing each other on the wing through the cemetery, swooping up and down and balancing on obelisk tombstones. A crow holding a cracker in its mouth carried it around proudly, wanting every other bird in its group to see its prize, taunting them.

As recently as last year, Lancaster eagerly anticipated and celebrated the winter roost. Galleries hosted crow-themed art exhibits; experts gave talks at library branches; cafes and bars held crow-themed concerts or poetry readings, and restaurants concocted crow-themed dishes and drinks for the menu; local naturalists hosted evening walk-throughs at roost-heavy parks. (This winter, the website for these events listings has gone dark, and I’ve been unable to find crow-related cultural events anywhere, online or in the newspaper. Maybe this reflects a new stage in human-crow relations—tolerance, of a forgetting kind.)

However, to return from my digression, when the crows first made their presence felt, nearly 20 years ago, the reaction was negative. Park City Center’s operations manager set up four propane cannons on the mall’s roof (at a cost of $700 each) to bang off automatically during peak roosting time, to scare the crows away, like pests in a vineyard. The crows did relocate, but only as far as the parking lot and the long strip of trees hiding the Amtrak railway adjacent to the mall. The mall manager was not satisfied. “You can’t take a step without stepping in [crow poop],” he said. (Evidence of an actual negative impact on mall revenue never materialized.) In January 2000, a local article quoted McGowan (the aforementioned Cornell ornithologist), explaining that, after eons of having huge winter roosts in rural areas, “now the crows have changed their behavior slightly, such that they have been moving into town to do this and that’s when people start to notice it and think that we are having a huge population explosion of crows and get all upset.” This pattern is by now well established—even the people in progressive Portland are “all upset.”

Operation Enduring Freedom (from Crows)

As the crows roved about the sprawl looking for a place to roost, away from the noisy cannons, crow-dispersal fever spread through the city and several municipalities north of the city. These were Manheim Township, home to a national auto auction as well as innumerable car dealerships (I drive by them every day); East Hempfield township (the suburbanized farmland northwest of the city that Sonja hails from); and the borough of East Petersburg (the exurbanized village where I work). In 2002 officials and businesspeople from these municipalities formed a task force to get rid of the crows. In addition to the cannons at Park City Mall and other weaponized noisemakers, they entertained the idea of using falconers to disperse the crows. Crow antipathy—anticorvidy—had come to a simmer.

The local media played a key role in the drama that was about to ensue. At the beginning of the 2003 winter roosting season, a reporter interviewed an agent from the USDA Wildlife Services PA office, in Harrisburg. The agent from Harrisburg said he had visited Lancaster to see what the fuss was about. “The smell was overwhelming,” he told the reporter, adding that two weeks of harassment would cause the birds to move along—no problem! In a strange twist, the newspaper wrote that the federal agent “said his agency can help coordinate the effort for a fee but said he is not allowed to solicit business because the federal government is not supposed to compete with the private sector. Instead, potential customers have to come to him first.” A reader of the article could be forgiven for thinking that the newspaper was acting as matchmaker. Naturally, the task force members quoted for the piece sounded impressed.

In February 2004, under the supervision of the agent from Harrisburg, a group of volunteers from local police forces and businesses (but no conservationists or wildlife enthusiasts) harassed the mall birds with blank noisemaker rounds fired from guns. The group hoped the crows would abandon the mall area entirely and decamp to either the heavily forested Susquehanna River riparian zone or the farm areas west of the city, aka Amish country, a goal they felt was obtainable (Narrator: it wasn’t. This pattern, too, is now well established: “Efforts to drive crows back to a rural habitat involve various hazing methods: pyrotechnics, firecrackers, sirens, amplified distress calls, spotlights, and laser beams. None has been successful in permanently dispersing roosts” [Gade 166]).

Quickly and very matter-of-factly, the option of killing the crows arose as a logical next step. As the agent from Harrisburg said in the paper, “If they don’t disperse . . . the USDA might authorize lethal measures to rid the area of the crows.”

When the roost arrived again in the fall of 2004, the task force members were determined to kill, to send the collective a message: roost elsewhere, or die. They would have to wait a year, however, because the USDA needed to approve the poison for use in the field, and that would take time. (Background: The 1972 amendment to the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) banned the killing of crows outside of designated hunting seasons.) The procedure would cost $8,000 (the price tag didn’t bother anybody, as they were spending similar sums annually anyway). In the meantime they gave the noise-based methods another perfunctory try.

Some members of the public were starting to question the task force’s rush to violence. The task force leader, who in his normal role served as Manheim Township manager, stuck to his guns, even if he was feeling the heat. “If it was a bad thing to do,” he said, “we wouldn’t be doing it. . . . We are trying to protect other species—humans” (emphasis mine; absurdly, the manager, maybe taking a cue from the George W Bush administration in its selling of the Iraq War, framed the crow issue as one of public health and safety, using West Nile Virus and other hyperbolic scares to justify the poison option). Offering a counterpoint, McGowan said, “It’s not OK to kill thousands of birds to remove a minor nuisance.” Unwittingly, the crows had ignited a war of rhetoric. People took sides.

On Thursday, January 19, 2006, the agent from Harrisburg and three of his colleagues trudged into a field somewhere amid the sprawl and scattered poisoned food nuggets on the ground. They waited and watched. By nightfall, no crows had eaten the food. The agents carefully picked it up and bagged it, even though they had told the public the food posed zero threat to any other wildlife. They tried again the following Tuesday, again to no avail. Then, on Wednesday, Jan. 25, some unfortunate crows ate the poison and died of organ failure. At a subsequent poisoning a second group of crows repeated the mistake. By the end of that winter, 344 crow carcasses had been hauled to the landfill—at a cost of $23 per bird. Some carcasses were even pulled from schoolyards.

The Backlash

The backlash to the poisoning campaign was immediate, dug in, and highly publicized. Ornithologists with national reputations (including McGowan), animal protectionists, and local wildlife enthusiasts organized a grassroots campaign: in letters to the editor, public meetings, and a website, they waged politics on behalf of a non-human, native population.

It was almost too easy for them. Strategically, they raised alarms about the potential side effects of the poison, DRC-1339: Other animals higher up the food chain eating poisoned crows would themselves be poisoned—did the task force want to be responsible for using taxpayer dollars to kill bald eagles??? They questioned whether the poison could end up in the water supply. Finally, they argued that the poison program would fail no matter what, because, even if the crows ate the poison, the crows would likely die in a staging field rather than at the roost itself, and would therefore not associate these murders with the roost location—meaning that the roost would go on unaffected (which is basically what happened).

More fundamentally, they asked: Where will the crows go, if not here? The agent from Harrisburg’s claim that the crows would choose rolling farmlands or Susquehanna River woods had proven to be hopelessly unrealistic. Would it fall to some other city to do the same thing as Lancaster had done, with the end result being the extermination of a species, for the sake of cleaner windshields and blacktop?

The campaign worked. In August 2006, the mayor of Lancaster proclaimed at a rally that the city would not be funding any further poisoning programs. East Hempfield followed suit, and the other two did as well later that year. However, the task force leader remained the lone holdout—shotguns were an option, he told the newspaper (they weren’t, the agent from Harrisburg told the paper). Under pressure, the anti-crow coalition had fractured. In its place, the newly formed nonprofit Lancaster Crow Coalition agreed to use humane harassment methods on a case-by-case basis. They set up a hotline for people to call and report nuisance crow events—a prosaic form of a bat signal, or crow signal, as it were.

In hindsight, maybe people were tired of aggression. These were the mid-oughts: The country was divided over the Iraq War, the most massive foreign policy mistake of our lifetimes. Having been lied to about our troops being welcomed as liberators in Iraq, and about the purpose of the war to prevent a nuclear/biological/super deadly cataclysm, maybe people were skeptical of official voices like those of the agent from Harrisburg and the mall manager and the leader of the task force—those who preach action for action’s sake, and the supremacy of the white American settler. Maybe people had heard and read enough about explosives and collateral damage, and wanted to take control of the smallest slice of policy they could, and save someone, even a population of nonhumans, even a species that had once posed an actual threat to their ancestors’ survival.

Human/Corn/Crow All the Way Down

The recent phenomenon of the large urban winter roost can be understood as the latest phase in what Daniel Gade calls the “process of becoming (natura naturans)” and what John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell call “cultural coevolution” with our corvid familiars.

Gade traces the history of our relationship with this “synanthropic,” or human-depending, creature back to the dawn of civilization in North America. Unlike its cousin the raven, the crow prefers a cleared landscape. Crows don’t like a closed forest canopy (too hard to spot hawks and owls, not easy enough to peck their daily food out of the ground). Twelve-thousand years ago, when humans used their newly invented tool, the torch, to paint the continent with fire, the crow began to multiply, to replace the wilderness-bound raven. The beginning of agriculture in eastern North America 5,000 years ago invited further reproductive success. But it was the arrival of a specific crop that would finally tie the destinies of Homo sapiens and Corvus brachyrhynchos together forever.

By 200 AD the farming of Zea mays—corn—had crossed the Mississippi and by 1100 AD it “had become the basis of indigenous subsistence almost everywhere in eastern North America” (153). The planting of the crop on cleared land created a reliable feasting season for the crow, who was well-evolved to capitalize: The “stout, longish bill that can sink 5 centimeters into the soil equips the crow to efficiently dig up kernels. A pouch behind its tongue allows for the efficient transport of kernels to feed its young and itself” (156). The crows learned to read the ground to determine exactly where to dig to get at the corn. And the indigenous farmers planted corn at the same time the crows had their nesting season, when the birds needed plentiful food the most. Monocrop agriculture played right into the crows’ claws. There was no turning back—wherever the farmers planted corn, they set the table for the crows.

For more than 500 years, human and crow centered their cultures around the life cycle of corn. The relationship was antagonistic: “Corvine affinity for maize made the cornfield the stage on which man and bird played out a morality tale of the yeoman versus the feathered trickster” (155). Crows learned to let humans feed them, but in subsistence-farming communities, the humans did not consent.

Tribes had one prevailing strategy to thwart corn theft by crows. Variously by region, they built platforms, scaffolds, watchtowers, or guard huts in and/or around the cornfields. In these, old women and children took up position and, when the crows dropped from the sky to peck out the newly planted corn, they screeched and jumped up and down and clapped and waved to shoo the threat away.

The crows adjusted their tactics: “Initial chasing of crows by children would have favored increased crow flock size, persistence, and patience. Persistence and patience could represent evolving crow culture as behavioral characteristics initially learned by watching peers or parents foil human children spread through crow populations living in close contact with people” (Marzluff and Angell 72). The flocks grew larger and the crows learned to wait out the kids (and old women, presumably). In return, humans got creative. They set out empty gourds to house the purple martin (Progne subis)—territorial and fearless birds happy to chase crows away. In the same vein, the Narragansett trained hawks to scare off crows. Some tribes planted extra corn kernels to hedge against loss; others planted their corn extra deep, beyond the reach of the crows’ beaks.

In rare cases, Native Americans resorted to violence to solve the crow problem. The Iroquois soaked corn kernels in a poison concocted from the boiled roots of false hellebore (Veratrum viride). Crows who unearthed and ate the pre-soaked seeds stumbled about then died, frightening nearby flockmates, who now knew to avoid the field. Killing the crows en masse was never the plan, however. In fact, in Algonquin mythology, it was the crow that brought corn to humanity, and not the other way around. The idea was to send a message: “Rather than poison large numbers of crows, the intent was to convey an object lesson to the assembled flock so the other birds would fly away without feeding” (Gade 159). Which sounds familiar, of course, but keep in mind the stakes were much higher for the tribes.

The crows in turn expanded their diet to other crops planted by humans, like beans and potatoes. In a way, then, we may have had a hand in creating the crow’s famously omnivorous diet. Our actions only made them more like us. Can their fondness for eating street garbage be traced back to those early poisonings?

White settlers added the scarecrow to the toolkit which crows quickly learned to use as basically a restaurant sign. What had a far greater impact on the crow population was the wholesale slaughter of native peoples by European colonists—56 million dead. Between 1650 and 1750, with hardly anyone left alive to cut the trees and plow the fields, the forests closed over again. The raven replaced the crow.

Fewer Crows, Cooler Planet (and Vice Versa)

Only very recently have scientists determined that it’s no coincidence that the climate actually cooled during this same period (it’s called the Little Ice Age). In the wake of the massacres, trees overtook the abandoned farms of the natives. The trees absorbed and sequestered much more carbon dioxide than the crops had. Therefore, while the crow was absent and the raven triumphant, the climate cooled.

It’s a direct correlation: more crows, hotter planet. That should make anyone seeing the massive roosts now worried at what they mean for our world. As Haupt says, “A planet on which urban crows are thriving in such numbers is a planet with too much concrete—a substrate to which very few nonhumans can adapt. . . . Crows render both wonder and warning” (228). Although Haupt here is referring to the loss of habitat through over building, the “warning” of crow abundance applies equally well to climate change—a totally unsurprising finding.

As white American settlers cut down the forests and replaced Indian towns and fields with their own towns and fields, and as crows returned to their former strength, the human-crow relationship reverted to its earlier paradigm, only the whites had no sense of limiting excess. Early farming villages put bounties on the heads of crows and organized crow hunting parties. On top of being good citizenship, shooting crows was financially rewarding. In the early 20th century, with the spread of shotguns and dynamite, American farmers turned keeping crows away from their fields into an industrial extermination campaign—especially in the Midwest, and especially during the Depression. There are reports of people detonating dynamite at winter roosts—still rural only then—to kill thousands of birds at a time. (Maybe it’s not a mystery after all why the crows now center their roosts on cities and refuse to leave them . . .)

Persecuted relentlessly, the crows evolved a heightened wariness that serves them well even today: “Crow memes characterized by selective avoidance and keen recognition would have been favored” (Marzluff and Angell 72). They learned to recognize guns. They famously learned to recognize and remember individual faces, and to remember who was bad and who was okay. They even learned to see into our souls. As Gade says, “Innate cautiousness and an uncanny capacity to read human intentions have made them difficult to approach or kill” (156). (Anyone who’s tried to get close enough to one to snap a picture with a smartphone knows this.) Crows learned to mistrust people, even as they knew their wellbeing depended on us.

Misreading the Crow

At the same time, studies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries proved that, ironically, crows on balance helped farmers more than they hurt them. Analysis of stomach contents showed that, during the growing season, crows switch their diets to harmful insects (Gade 163). In other words, in return for being fed during their nesting season, they served as biological pest control for the farmers while crops grew. Of course, that lesson was ignored, at least until the post-Silent Spring era (recall the 1972 MBTA amendment forbidding the killing of crows).

In spite of the thirst for corvine blood, the crow thrived—the U.S. government itself did more than anyone to help replenish its numbers. By subsidizing suburbs and industrial farming, Uncle Sam helped build the perfect environment for a nation of crows: the Great American Monoscape.

So how did the crow come to join “the urban bestiary?” By associating guns with danger, crows were able to deduce the inverse: cities and towns, conspicuously void of trigger-happy farm folk with shotguns, became obvious havens. With a gun-free, owl-free, and garbage- and warmth-rich setting available to them, crows began to use our cities for their roosts.

Personally, I wonder whether crows take other pleasures in gathering in large numbers in cities, beyond the utilitarian ones that experts have already speculated on. Is it possible they just like the hustle and bustle of cities?

Postmodern Equilibrium

In a sort of postmortem forum titled “Lancaster’s Wintering Crows: A Community Response” held October 25, 2006, at Franklin & Marshall College, a guest speaker from the Audubon Society said, “Maybe the birds are not the problem. Our reaction to them is the problem.” There was, reports say, applause.

Indeed, Angell and Marzluff argue that, the trend of exurbanization being entrenched since the 1950s and showing no signs of slowing, we’d be better off trying to change people rather than the crows. “By encouraging attitudes of wonder and curiosity towards crows,” they write, “these common and highly visible birds could form a respected (or at least tolerated) part of the natural environment of cities, which could also help counteract attitudes that view cities as distinct from nature or without ecological value” (291).

The roost is a big loud symbol of how we have changed the world. Trying to shoo it away is like aggressively clapping at a mirror. The winter urban roost is our planet talking to us, in the semiotics of crow flight, crow caw, crow shit.

With each new city colonized, crows create a new contract with us. They will take the food that we drop or leave in the field. They will make their noises and drop their waste. Some of us will be ticked off or annoyed but no one among us will seek to harm any of them. If they mistake valuable property for waste property (they are only beginning to learn to distinguish the gleam of a Porsche Cayenne windshield, say, from the dull steel shine of an Amtrak rail), or get too close to the beloved mall, one or two of us will come out and fire bangers and screamers at the sky near them. Others of us will write poems about them, or make songs, or visual art, or recipes that the crows will not be aware of. We will notice them.

We will put crows in our movies, flapping away from a tree and cawing, ominously, when we cut away from an action scene that most likely features gunshots.

From here, our fates will become further entangled, because our lights that burn all night long and hide the stars also protect them from the talons of their dreaded great horned owl; our heat-absorbing parking lots and roofs warm them on polar vortex nights; and the corn that enters our bodies in the form of processed foods and makes us what we are also feeds them and makes them what they are. After all, “the processed snack foods of North American culture, including beef jerky, cheese puffs, tortilla chips, and bagels, suit corvine palates as well” (Gade 169). We still are at the cornfield. Only now it is asphalt, and the corn, instead of raw and seasonal, comes in the many chemical reformulations that the wonders of modern food production can conjure.

There are other reasons why the city of the future, of now, will be/is a crow-filled one. One, the human world is increasingly urban. Of every two people alive on earth now, one lives in a city. The distinctions between city and suburb, suburb and exurb, exurb and country, country and wild have become blurry, and they are getting blurrier. Crows have followed us on our journey thus far and there is no reason to expect them to untie themselves from us now. As far as we try to build away the “natural” landscape, the crows penetrate.

There is another, scarier reason that crows will be even more reliant on us: the bugs are going extinct. Apparently, the insects that animals like crows once sustained themselves on have been vanishing from the earth—right under our noses. If we can extrapolate from this, soon, we have to believe, crows will be unable to leave our cities in the springtime, after the roost, because they will have trouble feeding themselves on their natural diet of bugs. They will rely even more on our dropped nachos. In their garbage-eating habits and love of sprawl, crows share our tastes (if the Crow Coalition were to project Netflix on the side of the mall, we’d probably find the crows all binge-watching it from the trees).

Sleeping with the Lights On

One evening this winter, I slipped through the membrane of woods at the edge of the mall parking lot and went walking along the railbed. The crows were settling onto their perches. It was almost full dark, but you wouldn’t know it from the glare of lights. As I picked my steps along the rail ties, I found that if I kept my head down and walked purposefully, fewer crows alighted from the branches. If I looked up, more of them flew away. Always some flew away (though probably only to quickly glide back; they seemed in no great fear of me), and some remained. They were all silhouettes.

I stopped and looked up. A single crow flew almost directly above me, riding a current back and forth laterally. It must have been the lookout. After a few seconds, it wheeled back, apparently satisfied I was not a shooter or a poisoner. I walked on, eventually coming to a narrow hill rising between the two railbeds. The hill had been bulldozed smooth all the way up. At the top of the hill a gnarly old tree grew out of a mound of pushed-up earth sprinkled with bird poop. The crows surrounded me but had left the nearby branches as I approached.

I looked out over the railbed and through the bare winter branches. At the main entrance to Boscov’s, the decorative lights were shining through the smoked glass facade, like a glimpse of the 1980s seen from a distance, and I surmised that it, too, would soon go vacant like the Sears and the Bon-Ton. The lone mall cop was driving slowly up and down the aisles of the mostly empty parking lot, yellow watchlights swirling. I wondered what the crows read into it. I felt a crackling, unreadable intelligence around me, and a longing for comfort that was not unfamiliar.

*Photography (other than the aerial mall photo) and video by Sonja Crafts and Jeremy Hauck

Sources:

• Gade, Daniel W. “Shifting Synanthropy of the Crow in Eastern North America.” Geographical Review, vol. 100, no. 2, 2010, pp. 152-175.
• Marzluff, John M., and Tony Angell. “Cultural Coevolution: How the Human Bond with Crows and Ravens Extends Theory and Raises New Questions.” Journal of Ecological Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 1, 2005, pp. 69-75.
• Haupt, Lyanda Lynn. The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild. Little, Brown 2013.
• Avery, Michael L., Eric A. Tillman, and John S. Humphrey. “Effigies for Dispersing Urban Crow Roosts.” UC Davis 2008.
• The play-by-play of Lancaster’s crow roost drama owes much to reportage by local newspapers now defunct, accessed through an academic database.

Suggestions for further reading:

• Marzluff, John M., and Tony Angell. Gifts of the Crow. Atria 2013.
• Marzluff, John M., and Tony Angell. In the Company of Crows and Ravens. Yale UP 2007.
• Haupt, Lyanda Lynn. Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness. Hatchette 2011.