Love them or hate them, it’s not just your imagination: Portland’s crow population has exploded.
Gary Granger—who readers may remember from his 2019 corvid conversation with us and his report of an assault on a homeless man that a 911 dispatcher downplayed—and his research partner, Rebecca Provorse, count crows between November and February throughout downtown Portland. They define that as anywhere west of the Willamette River and east of Interstate 405′s carved borders (the Pearl District and Old Town fall within this boundary, for example, but Goose Hollow does not). The Oregon Birding Association published Granger and Provorse’s findings for the autumn 2023 issue of its biannual journal Oregon Birds.
Should this year’s trends continue, Portland’s murder rate will steadily climb past the tens of thousands. Five key findings from Granger and Provorse’s report stand out as sunset squawking grows louder and earlier…