Rook fledgling draws dozens of Hooded Crows to Copenhagen playground
Channel: Bent Lorentzen
Date: 2015-05-28

This video of feeding and interactively stimulating/caring for a fledgling Rook (Råge in Danish) in a public playground grew into a rather unexpected drama towards the end.    The reason I brought him out to this little park alongside one of Greater Copenhagen’s busiest streets (Frederikssundsvej) into downtown at 5 AM, a day and a half after rescuing him from certain painful death, is for him and his family up in the trees to maintain a degree of bonding and strong memories of one another, and for the fledgling to stay concurrently framiliar with the habitat of his birth, as best I can manage it under these difficult circumstances.  Baby crows in the wild will frequently fall out of trees.  They are highly curious about their world almost as soon as they hatch, attempt perhaps to walk out of the nest, and a wind will push them down from a great height.  As you can see, he apparently has sustained no injury.  At this age, a fledgling hasn’t yet developed the ability to grasp branches, but that should occur soon.  He’s growing very fast.

Immediately upon rescuing him from some hovering seagulls, on May 26, 2015, being busy with the bird, I asked a city subcontractor working in the park, installing lighting, to contact the emergency hotline for the Danish Animal Welfare Service (Dyrenes Beskyttelse).  Over the phone, I asked them to please come and care for the bird, since it would not in any way survive without human help, in a habitat that is human-created… hence humans are responsible to a large extent.  In the wild, fledgling crows without yet the ability to grasp branches, and who fall to the ground, will be led by parents and other members of the family group into the relative safety of dense shrubbery.  There they generally will be cared for and protected by the extended family group.  But in this park, which until 2 years ago had been a wild overgrown thicket above an old WW II underground bunker, the fledgling would have died from exposure to the cold at night, from dogs not on leashes, cats, seagulls, other predators, teens whom I have seen behave cruelly to wildlife while drunk, and that main street just 2 yards away from the park’s edge.

The rooks that have dominated, from the tallest tree, this little spit of now-manicured green habitat, have not had much success in bringing any young into maturity since the city turned it into a playground.   Every spring, I see one or two fledglings, dead on the ground or out on that busy street.  They began building their nests here since long before it had been turned into a park, and I did vainly protest that to the municipality and a state agency equivalent to the US EPA.

We talked on the phone back and forth for several minutes, where I explained all this to them, and reminded them that these corvidaes have scientifically been tested to have the cognitive and emotional IQ equivalents, or above, that of the chimps, our closest genetic cousins.  Despite that, Dyrenes Beskyttelse asked me to let the crow die its unnatural and traumatically certain death, explaining that they didn’t have the resources to care for it and that I don’t have the license to care for this species.  

Anyways, I could morally no more do that than to let a human baby, without capable parents, be exposed to an overnight killing cold, crawl through a pack of hungry feral dogs, and then out into a busy street.

When I first saw them years ago, everyone told me they were black crows.  Having had no academic experience with rooks, I made a huge mistake in initially classifying them as carrion/black crows