Crows, Pigeons and Swallows

The eerie afternoon forest is filled with a seductive silence that is subtly broken by the occasional wails of the wandering birds that bear their souls to the wood. A charming melody is in effect here, where the falling sun meets the rising moon, and all the shining eyes emerge from the shadows to begin their nightly crawl. Recent research has found some crow species capable not only of tool use, but of tool construction as well. They are now considered to be among the world's most intelligent animals. Crows make a wide variety of calls or vocalizations. Whether the crows' system of communication constitutes a language is a topic of debate and study. Crows have also been observed to respond to calls of other species; this behavior is presumably learned because it varies regionally. Pigeons exhibit considerable variations in size. The largest species are the crowned pigeons of New Guinea, which are nearly turkey-sized, at a weight of 2-4 kilograms (4.4-8.8 lb.). Pigeons are distributed everywhere on Earth, except for the driest areas of the Sahara Desert, Antarctica and its surrounding islands and the high Arctic. The largest number of species are found in tropical forests and woodlands, where they may be arboreal, terrestrial or semi-terrestrial. Various species also inhabit savannas, grasslands, deserts, temperate woodlands and forests, mangrove forests, and even the barren sands and gravels of atolls. Swallows are dependent on flying insects and as these are common over waterways and lakes they will frequently feed over these, but they can be found in any open habitat including grasslands, open woodland, savanna, marshes, mangroves and scrubland, from sea level to high alpine areas. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=123299