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Science Quickly

For Some Crows, Migration Is Optional

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2018

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Crows are what's known as "partial migrants"—as cold weather approaches, some crows fly south whereas others stay put. And that behavior appears to be ingrained. Christopher Intagliata reports.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

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0:11.0

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0:19.6

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0:28.4

When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

0:33.7

This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

0:39.1

Every winter, huge hordes descend upon the parking lots of big box stores.

0:44.4

I'm not talking about Black Friday shoppers, but crows.

0:47.7

There's videos of them all over YouTube.

0:50.6

There is, you can see, they're in the trees.

0:53.7

They're on the rooftop over there.

0:56.6

And it's like Hitchcock's the birds.

1:00.6

So sometimes they're 4,000, 10,000, even 20,000 birds in these flocks.

1:06.2

Andrea Townsend is a behavioral ecologist at Hamilton College in New York.

1:09.9

They're really noticeable because what they like are urban areas.

1:13.6

So you'll see them in well-lit urban parking lots.

1:17.5

That's sort of their favorite place to spend the winter.

1:20.2

Crowes, she says, are what's known as partial migrants.

1:23.0

Every year, some members of the population migrate between breeding grounds

1:26.5

and their overwintering

1:27.9

grounds, like parking lots. But others just stay put. So Townsend and her colleagues wanted to know if

1:33.7

that urge to migrate was something individual crows can turn on and off. To find out, they captured

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