Counting Crows

30 years of study have shown Kevin McGowan, PhD ’87, the birds’ softer side.

BY KIM FRANKE-FOLSTAD

Forever Bulls

K EVIN MCGOWAN HAS FRIENDS in high places. Lots of them.

The creator of the popular All About Birds website (allaboutbirds.org), has been researching, writing and lecturing about his feathered field of study for more than 30 years.

But he credits a single crow for helping him finish his dissertation back in 1987, when he received his

McGowan had been studying Florida scrub jays with the late Glen Woolfenden, an esteemed Florida ornithologist and USF professor. He loved the work and those birds, but when it came time to sit down and write about young scrub jays’ social development, he struggled. “My interest was in watching birds, not doing statistics,” he says. “I needed some green time” outdoors.

One day as he pedaled his bike to school, McGowan spotted a fish crow at the USF entrance and it piqued his curiosity. Was there a crow’s nest there? He’d never seen

one. The search was on - the perfect diversion. He started watching different pairs of the birds and eventually found nests scattered across the Tampa campus. Then he monitored the nests. The fish crows were similar to scrub jays – they were generalists and omnivores – but they were different, too. “I was hooked,” McGowan says.

Sated, he finally finished his paper and in 1988 was hired by Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., as a curator/ research associate. There he discovered a surprising shortage of information on fish crows or the American crows common in Ithaca and focused his research on the behavioral ecology of both, especially their social behavior.

In 1994, McGowan, who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in zoology from The Ohio State University, became principal curator of the bird and mammal collections at Cornell. With that position came access to a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. What would be a worthwhile subject to study? “Crows!” he says.

Most farmers considered his favorite birds a nuisance,

PHOTOS

Kevin McGowan tags a nestling crow in New York. He has tagged and followed hundreds of crows in his years at Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Opposite page: The fish crow, endemic to the Southeast United States, inspired McGowan’s interest in the birds when he was a doctoral student at USF.