Click here to download. Much too common for some people's tastes and largely neglected by ornithologists, the plain old American crow gets special attention from one Cornell University researcher. Kevin J. McGowan and his Cornell student helpers prepare their climbing gear each spring and ascend to the tree-top nests where they tag young crows four weeks after they hatch. In a sense they are, although the birds' behavior when they return home is of more interest to McGowan, the associate curator in the university's Mammology and Ornithology Collections and a senior research associate in the Section of Ecology and Systematics. But American crows never chase away their offspring.
Some crows stay with their parents for up to five years or longer.
Such helping behavior is of particular interest to evolutionary biologists, who try to understand why sexually mature animals sometimes forgo breeding and instead help closely related kin. With each crow coded by year of birth and parentage, McGowan can return to the ground with his binoculars and watch the extended family dynamics. Crows almost never breed before they're 2 years old. While they wait for a breeding opportunity, most crows help their parents raise young in several ways. They help feed the incubating female, they feed the nestlings and fledglings, they defend the nest and surrounding territory and they stand guard over other family members while they forage.