Laura & all-- Crows start roosting together at night in November. Christmas bird counts can be good indicators of locations and numbers of big roosts, some of which have existed for generations. You can see birds in the tens of thousands arriving at dusk and departing at dawn in big urban roosts in Cincinnati, Springfield, and Mansfield. Roosts in excess of two million birds have been recorded, though not in Ohio. Frank Renfrow wrote an intriguing article on the Cincinnati roost in the Ohio Cardinal seven years ago, where he estimated mid-winter roosts there at perhaps 70,000 birds, and traced this ancestral assemblage to the name of the famous Rookwood Pottery works. Last winter's CBCs included estimates from Springfield of 20,000 and from Mansfield of 15,000. There are many smaller roosts around the state. These birds usually start assembling at staging areas an hour or sobefore sundown, then converge on the roost as it grows dark. You can learn a lot about this phenomenon, and about the fascinating lives of crows, at Kevin McGowan's web site at http://www.birds.cornell.edu/crows/crowinfo.htm . Bill Whan Columbus ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]