Pratt Museum | Kachemak Bay: An Exploration of People and Place | How Have We Survived?

Pratt Museum: Homer Society of Natural History

Commuter Crows - Wildlife Ingenuity

If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.
-Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Mid-1800s

Corvus brachyrhynchos
American Crow

Cross-bay commuters and dumpster divers, local crows take advantage of both sides of Kachemak Bay. During daylight, they caw and dine in Homer's dumpsters, in trash-hauling pickup trucks, and at the landfill. At dusk, many fly back to rest in remote, communal roosts in dead spruce trees on the south shore. Corvids, the bird family that includes ravens, jays, magpies and crows, are smart and adaptable.

Why do they commute? Because they can. Flying at 45 miles an hour, the short commute across Kachemak Bay, as the crow flies, takes only minutes.

Before the 1960s, crows were rarely seen in Homer. "Seldovia Crows" as they were known, stuck to their coastal rainforest habitat, content to eat intertidal mussels. In the 1970s, a drastic shift in ocean temperatures caused changes in sea life. With this sea change and a swelling, garbage-generating human population in Homer, opportunistic crows pushed north to Homer.