Thoughts About Crows

     I was driving through a part of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland on February 16th and noticed a scattered flock of scores of crows feeding in fields harvested to the ground on both sides of the country road I was on.  About a dozen other crows were perched on roadside wires.  I stopped to see what the crows were doing and heard them cawing.  Judging from the tones of their voices, there were American crows and fish crows in the mixed flock, though I wouldn't have known that by sight alone.  Fish crows' cawing is more nasal than that of American crows.
     Thousands of American crows in large flocks have been in Lancaster County all winter, as in winters past.  They are some of the crows that nest in Canada's forests, but winter in the Lower 48 where food is more abundant and available in cropland in winter.  But these crows appeared smaller than the wintering Canadian crows, indicating they probably are locally-nesting crows that went farther south for the winter, but are now returning to raise young in local farmland. 
     In the last week I've noticed several crows moving, here and there, high across the sky from east to west over Lancaster County on migration to nesting territories.  And on February 15th, I saw a pair of crows investigating a few tall Norway spruce trees in our back yard, probably for a nesting site.  But, since they were completely silent, I don't know if they were American crows or fish crows. 
     But, getting back to the mixed gathering of crows in the fields and on roadside wires, I noticed about a half dozen of them eating something on the blacktop road.  With binoculars, I saw the "something" was a dead male American kestrel, without its head.  About that time, one crow flew with the dead body in its beak to the side of the road where that carcass could be devoured in relative safety from passing vehicles.
     Meanwhile, I saw that the six-foot-high banks on both sides of that stretch of rural road was riddled with small holes and runways in their soil; the works of field mice.  Apparently, the kestrel was perched on those same roadside wires to watch for field mice emerging from their burrows in the soil, as I have seen many kestrels do in the past.  Perhaps the kestrel dropped to a bank to catch a mouse, but was hit by a passing vehicle.  Or maybe the kestrel was caught and killed by a peregrine falcon or a Cooper's hawk, both of which hunt birds in Lancaster County's farmland.  Having been killed by a hawk would explain the absence of the kestrel's head as hawks often behead their prey.  The feeding peregrine or Coop might have been interrupted during its kestrel meal and dropped the dead bird onto the country road where the scavenging crows found it.
     I suspect the crows I saw on the 16th, and through the week before that date, were American crows and fish crows returning to Lancaster County and neighboring counties in southeastern Pennsylvania to rear offspring.  They might have been a bit earlier than usual this spring because, so far, we have had a mild winter here.  And I am sure they were not crows from Canada because they were smaller, were in farmland where the Canadian crows had not been all winter and the flock was partly composed of fish crows.