The Great Oakland Crow Fly-In (video)

Video shot by my husband @hughgrew from underneath our Oakland crows’ nightly roosting trees in our urban neighborhood.

I’m not good at estimating numbers. Thousands? They arrive all at once in a huge stream after staging in smaller clusters around the city before sundown.

They’ve been roosting here every fall and winter since we moved into our apartment, and likely long before. They leave for nesting sites in the spring, and come back in the fall with bigger families and a lot more crows. Their return marks the change of the seasons for me, and I always look forward to hearing the ruckus outside our window, on that first night of their roost.