Are you attempting to identify an owl? Whether or not you’re within the woods or in your yard, the decision of an owl is distinctive, however attempting to identify an owl will be difficult, particularly with their camouflage. Nevertheless, crows can really enable you spot an owl.
Try this video to see how:
Within the video, crows caw and mob a tree. Clearly one thing has them upset. After additional examination, you may see two nice horned owls sitting within the tree. They mix in very effectively with the bark, however to the crows, who’ve a motive to be afraid of the owls, they’re sounding the alarm.
The video comes from Dispatches From the Forest, the Instagram account of a podcast.
This conduct is appropriately known as mobbing. Numerous crows act aggressively in direction of a predator to drive it from a nest or space.
Probably the most fundamental motive for this interplay is that crows are the prey of owls. Like a cat and mouse or shark and fish, the 2 animals aren’t followers of each other.
Studies into mobbing conduct discovered that crows that participated within the act had a decrease danger of ending up as a meal for an owl. Whereas birds that prevented the tactic ended up being prey.
So that they’re partly warning and defending one another. However another analysis reveals that crows might do that to harass owls throughout the day and maintain them awake.
“Whereas there doesn’t look like a definitive reply among the many scientific group about why crows expend vitality mobbing owls, at any time aside from throughout the breeding season when they’re defending their younger, the prevailing principle is that crows have an innate dislike of owls and use their daylight benefit to torment their largest predator,” says a blog post from Carleton Faculty.
What do you suppose? Are the crows initially attempting to torment these owls?