Today my younger students and I did a walk around Al Borlin Park in Monroe.
We watched a pair of crows very methodically rip moss off the larger
branches of maple trees and toss it, like a Frisbee, into the air, to fall
to the ground. We watched them for awhile but at no time did they appear to
be eating anything, just ripping off chunks of moss and sending them
sailing. One was actually flicking its head as if to maximize the sailing
distance from the branch. The other was more or less just dropping the moss.
As we walked around the park, we found many places with moss on the ground
below maples and so the crows have obviously been very industrious working
on this pursuit. Anybody ever seen this and have a theory for why? My
theories were, they were looking for food but not finding it, thus we did
not see them eating anything, or they were playing some kind of crow moss
game. Or maybe something to do with nesting material prepartion? Some of
the moss chunks were as big as 4 inches by 6 inches, and it took a bit of
work to get it free.

One of the parents on our trip theorized that this was a parent and young
and that they were homeschooling and learning a lesson about Newtons law of
gravity and the aerodynamics of moss. This was as good a theory as any I
could come up with. We were all pretty amazed by the amount of moss laying
about on the ground.

Rob Sandelin
Naturalist, Writer, Teacher
Monroe, WA
HYPERLINK "mailto:floriferous at msn.com"floriferous at msn.com


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