Crows at Dusk

The thick mist floating between the trees billows around black wings as crows cascade from one shadowed branch to another. As sunlight slowly fades, the eyes of these feathered faces begin to glow with the wariness of a pack of flying wolves waiting to set upon the passing of their next unprotected prey. The crow genus makes up a third of the species in the Corvidae family. Other corvids include rooks and jays. Crows appear to have evolved in Asia from the corvid stock, which had evolved in Australia. A group of crows is called a flock or a murder. Recent research has found some crow species capable not only of tool use, but of tool construction as well. Crows are now considered to be among the world's most intelligent animals. The fossil record of crows is rather dense in Europe, but the relationships among most prehistoric species is not clear. Jackdaw-, crow- and raven-sized forms seem to have existed since long ago and crows were regularly hunted by humans up to the Iron Age, documenting the evolution of the modern taxa. American crows are not as well-documented. A surprisingly high number of species have become extinct after human colonization, especially of island groups such as New Zealand, Hawaii and Greenland. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=112397