The Crow Download
Cecelia Seiner
Kaeli Swift is an avian behavioral ecologist and a postdoc at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. from UW, where she studied the death behaviors of American crows. You can keep up with Kaeli and her research on Twitter.
If you see a large black corvid being mobbed by one or more smaller ones, you can pretty much guarantee that the big one is a raven and s/he is being harassed by the crow Neighbourhood Watch committee.
In the city, crow pairs tend to claim half a block or so as their territory. They spend most of their daylight hours there and will usually chase off other crows who cross the invisible crow boundaries.
I have always believed ravens were less urban than crows, though you are lucky to live in a city so close to so much gorgeous nature! I have only seen ravens in my small bedroom community in the Willamette Valley once, and that was during the height of terrible wildfires that I believe drove them west out of the mountains.
Hi June, another Knowledge Hunter article of great interest & learning, thanks my friend. I had serious gloom because the black bamboo kept dropping its leaves after transplanted in a lovely large pot of fresh shroom manure. Gardenworks told me it was like giving steak to a baby! Dug it back up, rinsed off the very much alive root ball & planted it w/fresh organic container soil & I can see evidence of tiny green bits happening. Phew, I really dreaded begging for a 4th piece from you! FYI, one Halloween I bought a $25 set of crows wings (I know, alas!) & came to ABC Photo as a dark angel. Well Matthew our digital guru & fashionisto supremo spent $140 for a set of superior raven feather wings from England. We made quite the pair of angels from the dark side! Thanks for the corvid news & my Bambino the black bamboo!
Great article! I live in the mountains of Western North Carolina at el. 4118.
I began putting out a fruit and nut blend on my second story deck rails for the birds because hanging feeders has attracted to many bears.
We have had a pair of crows regularly taking advantage of the food I leave here.
In the last two years they have left jewelry and even a plastic Easter egg with four 1975 quarters inside. The plastic egg was extremely dirty and the inside quarters were visibly dirty.
Trying to engage them, I have left out on the rail, two, two-inch sea shells with dried fruit, suet pellets and unsalted peanuts under the shells. I hope to witness some interesting reactions to them tomorrow!
Will ravens and crows go after my cats? My cats weigh about 20 lbs each. They like sitting on the balcony of my 11th floor condo. Lately noticed two huge crows or ravens coming on the balcony after I bring them inside.
Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that white people were the Chosen people, black people were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that black people were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to white people. Pro-segregation politicians gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the mongrelization of the white race. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely referred to black people as niggers, coons, and darkies; and worse, their articles reinforced anti-black stereotypes. Even children's games portrayed black people as inferior beings (see "From Hostility to Reverence: 100 Years of African-American Imagery in Games"). All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression of black people.
The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: white people were superior to black people in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior; sexual relations between black people and white people would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating black people as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep black people at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. The following Jim Crow etiquette norms show how inclusive and pervasive these norms were:
Jim Crow etiquette operated in conjunction with Jim Crow laws (black codes). When most people think of Jim Crow they think of laws (not the Jim Crow etiquette) which excluded black people from public transport and facilities, juries, jobs, and neighborhoods. The passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution had granted black people the same legal protections as white people. However, after 1877, and the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, southern and border states began restricting the liberties of black people. Unfortunately for black people, the Supreme Court helped undermine the Constitutional protections of black people with the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case, which legitimized Jim Crow laws and the Jim Crow way of life.
In 1890, Louisiana passed the "Separate Car Law," which purported to aid passenger comfort by creating "equal but separate" cars for black and white people. This was a ruse. No public accommodations, including railway travel, provided black people with equal facilities. The Louisiana law made it illegal for black people to sit in coach seats reserved for white people, and white people could not sit in seats reserved for black people. In 1891, a group of black people decided to test the Jim Crow law. They had Homer A. Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black (therefore, black), sit in the white-only railroad coach. He was arrested. Plessy's lawyer argued that Louisiana did not have the right to label one citizen as white and another black for the purposes of restricting their rights and privileges. In Plessy, the Supreme Court stated that so long as state governments provided legal process and legal freedoms for black people, equal to those of white people, they could maintain separate institutions to facilitate these rights. The Court, by a 7-2 vote, upheld the Louisiana law, declaring that racial separation did not necessarily mean an abrogation of equality. In practice, Plessy represented the legitimization of two societies: one white, and advantaged; the other, black, disadvantaged and despised.
Black people were denied the right to vote by poll taxes (fees charged to poor black people), white primaries (only Democrats could vote, only white people could be Democrats), and literacy tests ("Name all the Vice Presidents and Supreme Court Justices throughout America's history"). Plessy sent this message to southern and border states: Discrimination against black people is acceptable.
Jim Crow states passed statutes severely regulating social interactions between the races. Jim Crow signs were placed above water fountains, door entrances and exits, and in front of public facilities. There were separate hospitals for black people and white people, separate prisons, separate public and private schools, separate churches, separate cemeteries, separate public restrooms, and separate public accommodations. In most instances, the black facilities were grossly inferior -- generally, older, less-well-kept. In other cases, there were no black facilities -- no Colored public restroom, no public beach, no place to sit or eat. Plessy gave Jim Crow states a legal way to ignore their constitutional obligations to their black citizens.
Jim Crow laws touched every aspect of everyday life. For example, in 1935, Oklahoma prohibited black and white people from boating together. Boating implied social equality. In 1905, Georgia established separate parks for black people and white people. In 1930, Birmingham, Alabama, made it illegal for black people and white people to play checkers or dominoes together. Here are some of the typical Jim Crow laws, as compiled by the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site Interpretive Staff:
The Jim Crow laws and system of etiquette were undergirded by violence, real and threatened. Black people who violated Jim Crow norms, for example, drinking from the white water fountain or trying to vote, risked their homes, their jobs, even their lives. White people could physically beat black people with impunity. Black people had little legal recourse against these assaults because the Jim Crow criminal justice system was all-white: police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and prison officials. Violence was instrumental for Jim Crow. It was a method of social control. The most extreme forms of Jim Crow violence were lynchings.
Lynchings were public, often sadistic, murders carried out by mobs. Between 1882, when the first reliable data were collected, and 1968, when lynchings had become rare, there were 4,730 known lynchings, including 3,440 black men and women. Most of the victims of Lynch Law were hanged or shot, but some were burned at the stake, castrated, beaten with clubs, or dismembered. In the mid-1800s, white people constituted the majority of victims (and perpetrators); however, by the period of Radical Reconstruction, black people became the most frequent lynching victims. This is an early indication that lynching was used as an intimidation tool to keep black people, in this case the newly freed people, "in their places." The great majority of lynchings occurred in southern and border states, where the resentment against black people ran deepest. According to the social economist Gunnar Myrdal (1944): "The southern states account for nine-tenths of the lynchings. More than two thirds of the remaining one-tenth occurred in the six states which immediately border the South" (pp. 560-561).
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