The crows were quiet. They perched in bare-limbed trees, heads tucked beneath still wings, black bodies silhouetted against towering buildings tinged sepia by streetlamps. Occasionally, a sentry noticed me staring, and, unsettled, took flight, startling me with its lone caw. Despite the clamor of the night-dark city — trash trucks, bar noise, late-night buses — I’d grown used to the birds’ silence.
It was 3 in the morning, and I was walking through downtown Portland with local birder and naturalist Gary Granger. Since 2017, he and his wife, Rebecca, have documented the winter roost of thousands of American crows, sharing what they’ve learned through talks, social media and their website, pdxcrowroost.com. That February night — blessedly free of the region’s ever-present rain — I got to tag along.
Crows spend most of their time dispersed individually or in small groups, foraging for food and — particularly during mating and chick-rearing times in the spring and summer — maintaining territory. But evenings from roughly November to March, thousands of crows leave their usual haunts and gather in downtown Portland. It starts with a raucous pre-roost assembly, all noise and chaos and preening and ostentatious corvid acrobatics. As night falls, they disperse into trees and onto building ledges throughout downtown. Once roosted, Granger noted, they never squabble, never displace one another, and never eat. They come together, quite simply, to rest.
We walked at least seven miles, tracing a grid through downtown. I didn’t notice the first crows until Granger pointed them out, more than 100 birds hunkered in trees outside a Nike store, unbothered by the fairy lights adorning the trees or the cars driving by. After a while, I began to anticipate them, especially in trees near brightly illuminated buildings, where the shadows of their bodies were stark against the city. But the sight of several hundred crows sleeping along an urban street, fully ignoring the human noise around them, never failed to make me feel like I had walked through a portal to another world.
That night, we counted more than 12,000 crows.
CROWS GATHER IN SIMILAR urban winter roosts all over the continent, but we don’t know exactly why. It could be that cities are warmer than rural places, thanks to the way concrete soaks up and radiates heat. But roosting crows never huddle together, and in Portland they rest on the outer limbs of trees, exposed to the wind and rain. It could be that there is plentiful food, but studies of winter crow roosts show that the birds disperse to forage during the day. It could be that there are fewer predators, but even cities have owls and hawks, and some roosting groups, like the one in Irvine, California, start the night in urban areas, then move into nearby wetlands, where predators are bountiful.
It may be, ironically, that the crows come to the city to avoid one predator in particular — us. Throughout much of the settler-state United States, crows have been reviled as pests, perceived as wreaking havoc on agricultural lands. Humans have retaliated: A 1940 issue of Life described an Illinois Department of Conservation campaign where game wardens and farmers destroyed crow roosts with dynamite, then clubbed the stunned crows. In one winter, the magazine noted, the department’s “score” hit 328,000 crows.
Studies have shown that crows have long, socially shared memories, that they can distinguish individual humans and teach other crows who and what should be considered a threat. Perhaps many of the surviving crows decided moving out of farmlands was in their best interest.
Still, the city is not exactly a haven. Here, too, we see them as pests: While they don’t eat at the roost, they do poop, frequently and plentifully. You can tell where crows have been roosting by the white smatterings that coat the sidewalk like crusted snow.
For a while, downtown Portland relied on pressure-washing and the assistance of a Zamboni-like sidewalk-cleaning-machine known as the “Poopmaster 6000,” but the droppings accumulated anyway. In more recent years, Downtown Portland Clean & Safe, a nonprofit funded by downtown businesses and property owners, has switched to falconers, who are paid around $55,000 annually to bring in Harris’ hawks several nights a week to harass the crows away from the core business district. The hazing works, but only temporarily; Granger has noticed that the crows learn the falconers’ hours and move into the area the hawks were patrolling once they pack it in for the night. That means the sidewalks get cleaner, but hardly clean.
On the one hand, I understand the hazers: The crows roost across a hundred or so square city blocks, leaving a field of white splotches under every single tree and building ledge they sleep on. It looks messy and is a potential health risk. But I can’t help thinking we owe the crows more. We attacked them while they slept; we transformed their historical habitats and built sprawling urban ecosystems. Now we have the gall to be annoyed when they show up to rest. If crows have decided spending time among us is the best way to survive the winter, I figure it behooves us to find ways to accommodate them.
The sight of several hundred crows sleeping along an urban street, fully ignoring the human noise around them, never failed to make me feel like I had walked through a portal to another world.
DAWN APPROACHED, and the crows grew restless. I could barely tell the sky was changing — just a little more blue at the edges, a little more definition in the clouds — but the crows were well aware the sun was coming up. Granger brought me to Pioneer Courthouse Square, a brickwork plaza home to food trucks and a fountain — and to the crows’ morning check-in. Hundreds of crows who had rested there were shaking off sleep, shimmying and stretching their wings. Thousands more were flying in from the trees and buildings to the west, arriving in flocks, then splitting into different trees. The sound was shocking, a cacophony of cawing voices clamoring over one another, dropping to quiet and then crescendoing to a croaking roar.
Watching the crows, I couldn’t help seeing a mirror image of my own queer community. Our exuberant gatherings at brunch and dance parties, yes, but more than that: our resilience, our togetherness. Like the crows, we’ve so often gathered in places where we’re not straightforwardly welcome, where we’re seen as dirt marring an otherwise uncontaminated society. Still, we’ve banded together and said: Here, we will come together. Here, we will make ourselves safe. Who am I to say the crows should do anything else?
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This article appeared in the October 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Room to roost.”
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