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No one really knows why there are so many murders of crows in downtown and Northwest Portland lately. But Gary Granger isn’t so concerned about that; he just likes to observe the crows and map how many there are on any given night. He and his wife, Rebecca Provorse, are bird nerds, after all.
To map the crows in the city, Granger, the director of community safety at Reed College by day and a crow-mapper by night, starts on his long walk just after sundown, a period of time called “astronomical twilight,” when the crows have all settled onto tree branches and power lines. The squawking is minimal, as is the hippity-hoppiting along pavement that crows do best. Granger bundles up and tucks snacks in his pocket.
He follows a grid map. He walks up and down streets, sometimes a distance of 13 miles, taking count of every single crow he can see in every single tree. Some trees, Granger says, have 300 to 400 crows sleeping in them. He notes the number of crows in voice notes on his phone. At the end of the night, he tallies all the crows up and goes to bed.
During last week’s walk, Granger tallied 18,500 crows, most of them in the Pearl District. He got pooped on only once.
“Some crows are perfectly still and have their heads tucked into their breast,” Granger says. “Some crows don’t have their heads tucked but aren’t moving. And some crows are obviously awake. They will turn their heads, stretch a little bit. They’ll start to fidget if you look at them from under for too long.”
His and Rebecca’s fascination began in 2017, when they went downtown after hearing about the crow population and watched them one night.
“Looking up and seeing thousands of creatures, intentionally coming to the city and sitting on top of trees, it’s just like, why?” He says. “We just have a curiosity about it.”
Granger, Rebecca and other tree nerds have some theories about why there are so many crows in the urban center. Their main predators, barred owls, don’t come into the city. Temperatures are also higher in the urban core, so it might make for a cozier sleep. Human food scraps are more abundant than in rural areas. And there’s more light in the city—crows don’t see well in the dark.
Granger doesn’t see himself as a savior. He’s not necessarily trying to convince people that the plight of crows should be a higher priority. But he does have a deep affection for the crows, and thinks any attempts to run them out of town (Downtown Portland Clean & Safe hires a group to unleash hawks annually in downtown) because they might be a little macabre is unkind, and unnecessary.
We may think crows are a monolith. And to Granger, they appear that way, too. But he says they can tell one another apart—much like humans.
“They can tell one another apart, but I can’t,” he says.