The animal in question is the crow. Professor Kevin McGowan, Associate Curator of birds and mammals at Cornell University has been studying the behavior of crows for the past 9 years. They will leave this territory during the day, and when they leave the territory and go off and join these other foraging groups of birds or congregate in cornfields and things like that no longer are they a unit. They're a bunch of individuals. We'd arrive together and then we'd just sort of pretend like we didn't know each other and wander off on our own respective ways.
Crows seem to do that as well.
When the birds gather together they could very easily be going out into singles flocks to try to look for mates. I suspect that this is actually an important component of why crows get together to forage. So the next time you see a crowd of young people flocking together at the local mall, just remember, birds of a feather have families, too. Pulse of the Planet is presented by the American Museum of Natural History. I'm Jim Metzner.