Crows, such as these seen at a graveyard outside St. Petersburg, Russia, have been associated with “murder” in folklore that dates back to the Middle Ages. Dmitri Lovetsky/Associated Press

Happy Halloween from your friendly neighborhood naturalist! This week I wanted to answer a couple of spooky questions with a nature-bent theme that have come up recently.

WHY IS IT CALLED A MURDER OF CROWS?

As you may already know, there is a colloquial term for a group of crows, called a “murder of crows.” There are some other great collective names for birds: A gaggle of geese; a band of jays; a parliament of owls; a charm of finches; and a waddle of penguins. Closely related to our crows, we also have an unkindness of ravens, but this gets us back to the question: just why is it called a murder of crows?

We can trace these terms back to the late Middle Ages (1400s), when the Egerton Manuscript and The Book of St. Albans first listed many of these endearing, or perhaps in the crow’s case, distasteful, collective nouns. These books, and their “terms of venery” (or “nouns of assembly”) were used as a way for people to display what class they belonged to, because only an upper class gentleman (or a psychiatrist) would know to use “an asylum of cuckoos” when a flock of those large birds passed by.

The actual origin of the term likely predates those books, began in folklore, and was apparently used in poetry. One thing crows have always been known for is being seen around dead things. In Ralph Palmer’s 1949 Maine Birds he notes, “among interesting food habits of the crow, as noted in Maine, are the following: feeding on Harbor Seal carcasses; eating a dead House Cat in winter; hunting Meadow Mice in fields; … robbing nests of young Robins; removing a Song Sparrow from a mousetrap and flying off with the bird,” and the list goes on and on. Some of these cases, especially ones in which they are feeding on carrion, would appear to make the crow guilty by association, but in others, the crow is a cold-blooded murderer. A popularly mentioned (but never referenced) legend apparently tells of crows gathering to decide the capital fate of a member of their group, thus leaving us with a group of murderers.

While crows may be associated with murder in folklore, there have been a few times in history where humans have been the murderer of crows. Perhaps most interesting was when, in 1924, the DuPont Powder Company made an attempt to increase sales of their ammunition by sponsoring a nationwide campaign to get people to shoot crows. There is still a hunting season for crows in Maine, but these smart corvids are a tricky target. In fact, it was revealed that only 12 crows were shot in Maine as a result of that marketing campaign.

So our crows have a fairly dark and maybe spooky backstory to their collective name. This does leave us with one important question to answer: If a whole flock of crows is called a murder, what do you call two crows? An attempted murder!

CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING PUMPKIN

It all began recently when my wonderful wife brought home half a dozen small pumpkins which she festively displayed on each step leading up to our front door. These orange orbs, a marvel of cultivated winter squash, would signal the world (and perhaps more importantly our thoroughly-decorated neighbors) that we were ready for All Hallow’s Eve. That is, until they mysteriously began to disappear! One by one, they were taken from the porch. Clearly the perpetrator had to be some ghoul going undetected by our security camera. Then, one was left, torn apart, stringy pumpkin innards and seeds scattered about. It was horrible! Even worse, the evil-doer was there, making a blood-curdling repeated screech, staring at me with its dark eyes, and shaking its big bushy tail: the most demonic gray squirrel I’ve ever seen.

All this leads me to a great question sent in by Forest Dillion of Brunswick, who asks, “What’s with the squirrel/chipmunk situation this year?” This was prompted by notes about his “10-year-old peach tree next to our house, which usually supplies us with hundreds of peaches; this year the squirrels ate them all, despite several protective measures. The chipmunks ate all our strawberries, grown in containers on the back deck.”

Between my wife’s pumpkins, and Forest’s peaches and strawberries, and I’m sure most readers with fruit or vegetables outside this year, it’s clear to see that squirrels are after whatever food they can find. Wild animals will take advantage of whatever food sources they have around them, especially those that are abundant and easy to find, but it is when regular foods become scarce that they need to get more creative.

This is shaping up to be a bad year for mast production. Mast is a collective term for seeds and fruit produced by trees and shrubs (a much more useful collective noun than a murder of crows). We have had some big mast years recently – last year the forest floor was absolutely covered with acorns in the fall. When mast is abundant, it often leads to higher survival rates through the winter for wildlife that eats it, especially squirrels, and can also lead to higher reproductive rates.

So perhaps given the recent mast years we’ve had, there are more squirrels around. But since this seems to be a bad year for nuts like acorns (as reader Patty Poole in Scarborough noted and wrote in about), those squirrels are having to get more creative as they search for food. We can at least hope that we don’t see another year like 2018 when we experienced the population boom that led to “squirrel-mageddon” along the roads. The last thing we need is another remake of a bad horror story.

Do you have a question for Doug? Email questions to ask@maineaudubon.org and visit www.maineaudubon.org to learn more about backyard birding, native plants, and programs and events focusing on Maine wildlife and habitat. Doug leads free bird walks on Thursday mornings, 7 to 9 am, at the Gilsland Farm Audubon Sanctuary in Falmouth.