A recent report on Feb. 2 said that hundreds of thousands of crows flew to Ulsan from Siberia and stayed there during the winter season, causing issues for local residents by leaving droppings everywhere and short-circuiting telephone lines. The birds stayed there because of the abundant prey and places to rest.
These migratory birds have kept their flight routes since prehistory. The crows regularly visit the Korean Peninsula from Siberia and stop in the country during winter.
As a boy in the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, I observed thousands of crows visiting the village during winter. They stayed on numerous Zelkova trees and ate barley leaves in the fields. My mom always asked me to shoo them away from the field. But in 1975 the field began to change and the barley crops became garlic fields instead.
Since then, the crows never visited again. I sometimes saw a few sedentary crows flying over mountains in other areas.
One day, I read a book called "Mind of the Raven" written by Bernd Heinrich, a zoologist. A raven is a kind of crow, but bigger. Anyway, Heinrich lived in a log cabin in Maine, in the northeastern United States. He observed the lifestyle of the raven in the woods for over a decade.
He found that they bathed in the snow, skated on it, made a hole in the bottom of the nest on a hot day and re-captured stones by dropping them. In particular, he noticed that the ravens had flown from Siberia to the Scandinavian Peninsula since prehistory, following herds of reindeer and hunters. By doing so, they gathered and were able to eat the leftovers.
Another book, "The Genius of Birds" written by Jennifer Eckerman, a biologist, noted that crows use three hundred sounds and hunt prey by using traps in New Caledonia, in the South Pacific.
This proves that the birds are very smart since they have communicative abilities and can make tools. Moreover, they are omnivorous, which has led them to stay wherever animals and humans live to obtain food. About one hundred kinds of crows exist all over the world.
The birds have appeared in mythology, folk tales and public culture for a long time throughout the world both with positive and negative symbolism. In Korea, legendary crows called "samjo-o" (three-legged crows) are described in mural paintings in ancient tombs of the Goguryeo Period. At that time, the birds served as spiritual animals that told people what to do and predicted the future.
On the Korean Peninsula, repeated wars caused citizens or soldiers to die. Especially during the winter, numerous flocks of crows ate the remains ― truly a shocking phenomenon. Farmers considered crows pests since they ate or damaged crops at a time when food was scarce. Due to these behaviors, the crow became known for being opportunistic and cunning.
Today, since farmers rotate crops and with the destruction of the ecosystem, crows have stopped visiting their regular destinations. As a result, hundreds of thousands of crows gather collectively in a specific area like Ulsan. This means that the Korean peninsula is changing into an uninhabitable land for birds.
Biologists say that the disappearance of a plant or an animal can affect one hundred kinds of other species or animals. The habitat shift of the migratory crows might be a warning to humans to care more for the environment.
Kim Jin-hyun (shinykim60@hanmail.net) is a retired English teacher who published a book titled, "Flower Is Flower."
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A recent report on Feb. 2 said that hundreds of thousands of crows flew to Ulsan from Siberia and stayed there during the winter season, causing issues for local residents by leaving droppings everywhere and short-circuiting telephone lines. The birds stayed there because of the abundant prey and places to rest.
These migratory birds have kept their flight routes since prehistory. The crows regularly visit the Korean Peninsula from Siberia and stop in the country during winter.
As a boy in the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, I observed thousands of crows visiting the village during winter. They stayed on numerous Zelkova trees and ate barley leaves in the fields. My mom always asked me to shoo them away from the field. But in 1975 the field began to change and the barley crops became garlic fields instead.
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