Look no further! The zone of contact is clearly my yard in Dungeness, WA. I look north and west, the crows sound dark and woodsy, their vocalizations end with "aye," and they eat clams and shore crabs in Dungeness Bay. I look south and east, the crows sound kind of corny, their vocalizations end with "aw," and they eat my walnuts, roadkill, and baby birds (which of course they "farm" for optimum energy consumption!). Once again science proves the obvious.

Since we have lovely Olympic Gulls here with befuddled parentage and sympatry, how about if we just call all the crows in western Washington "Olympic Crows." Have you heard the S'Klallam story about how "Crow" was hanging out with a bunch of large pink-legged gulls in the intertidal one day, and, before you know it, Crow couldn't tell who he was, either?

Bob Boekelheide
Dungeness


From: "Eugene Hunn" <enhunn323 at comcast.net>
Date: June 19, 2012 2:33:32 PM PDT
To: "'Louise Rutter'" <louise.rutter at eelpi.gotdns.org>, <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
Subject: RE: [Tweeters] Northwestern Crows

In the case of the ?Northwestern Crow,? while crows from the Kenai Peninsula to the outer Olympic Peninsula may vary little, there is no clear boundary between those crows and the mass of crows throughout western Washington. The ecological preference for beach foraging could simply be due to where the available crow foods are to be found along the densely forested outer coasts. If there are really two crow species in western Washington there should (or perhaps ?must?) be a zone of contact, of sympatry, where one could demonstrate the coexistence of two distinct species populations.

I remain highly skeptical of the ?Myth of Two Crows,? lacking some more definitive data.

Gene Hunn
Petaluma, CA
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