UW Bothell crows

For a stretch of years, the North Creek Wetland at UW Bothell was the place the region's crows came home to [1]. Counts of more than 14,000 birds began in 2016, and the roost swelled to roughly 20,000 by 2022 [1]. A year on, that number had fallen below 10,000, and by January 2025 it had reached zero [1]. Thousands of those birds simply took up residence somewhere else, settling at a new roost near Redmond [1]. Doug Wacker, an associate professor in the School of STEM, had studied corvids on campus since 2012 and offered several possible explanations [1]. The wetland had matured between the late 1990s and 2025, perhaps past what crows want [1]. Younger trees at the Sammamish Valley restoration site may have drawn them, as may the thousands of cackling geese that had settled in, or new campus buildings, or a roost that simply outgrew itself [1]. Wacker leans toward all of these together [1].