Hi Tweets,

David Chelimer writes:

>Leaving my house in central Seattle the other day
(snip)
>I can best describe it as a repeated call of "Ronald" or "Donald"
>although the consonants were muffled.
(snip)
>The only bird visible, and in plain view, was a crow
(snip)

This call and its variants used to puzzle me, also, and then it became clear
its author was invariably a Northwestern Crow Corvus caurinus; a similar
call in Seattle would be from an American Crow Corvus brachyrhynchos. In
Vancouver BC, the call usually sounds like a softly-uttered 'wargle'; it's
sometimes monosyllabic ('waaarg') while retaining the same soft, slightly
nasal quality.

Its cause mystifies: I've often wondered whether the crow saying this is an
escaped/released individual trained by humans to mimic human words, or it's
a wild bird that has suffered trauma or the corvid version of laryngeal
disease to its vocal apparatus--I've noted that a crow making this call
makes no other during the observation. Perhaps some wild crows utter it
particularly at this time of year (rarely heard it outside spring and
summer) for whatever reason makes sense to them, or---and I wouldn't put it
past the little rascals---they simply decide to do it to flummox birders.

Any corvid junkies out there know? Any theories?

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net