Crows of a different feather, fish crows, are coming to...

Crows, those bulky black birds with the big beak and raucous call, don’t usually pique our curiosity unless we notice something unusual about them.

We might even overlook their kinship to the more colorful blue jays — both are in the Corvidae bird family. Crows got left with black plumes after jays picked up the blue ones.

The crows we normally see around Houston are called American crow, and they utter a loud, grating call, caw-caw-caw. They fly on broad wings vigorously beating the air in level flight and rarely take a moment to soar.

But you may have noticed crows that seemed somehow different.

They probably wouldn’t have been ravens because even a single raven would be extremely rare in our area. In Houston, it’s best to call raven-looking birds crows.

But you might have seen fish crows. These have been relatively common in the Golden Triangle of Beaumont-Port Arthur-Orange — but not in the Houston area until the last few years.

People first began telling me about fish crows in Roman Forest in East Montgomery County about 10 years ago. Then they would tell me they’d seen the birds in the Lake Houston area. I have heard the birds calling several times at Jesse H. Jones County Park in Humble.

Crows and ravens Fish crows live only in the United States, mostly along Atlantic and Gulf Coasts and inland in southern states while American crows live in the US, Canada, and Bermuda. Fish crows are roughly 15-inches long and American crows about 17-inches long, a difference undetectable by sight. The name fish crow derives from the bird’s habit of feeding on dead fish but it also feeds on garbage, human waste foods, seeds, berries, and bird eggs. Other North American crows include northwestern crow of Pacific Northwest and Tamaulipas crow, a Mexican species once common in Brownsville until becoming rare by 2000. Ravens differ from crows with a large 2-foot long body, shaggy throat feathers, and a long wedge-shaped tail instead of a crow’s short square-shaped tail.

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The other day, my friend Barbara Hamilton sent me an email about fish crows she and her husband Will had been seeing in Kingwood.

“A few days ago, we were taking our evening stroll around our neighborhood and a flock of about eight flew over us squawking,” Hamilton said.

She sent me photographs of fish crows. “For the last several years now, we hear them in the morning and evening and often have a couple land in the large pines around our house.”

I’m not surprised. Fish crows have been expanding their range westward from coastal regions around Beaumont into northeast Texas and down into our area of Southeast Texas, apparently following river systems and inland lakes.

Keep your eyes peeled for crows. You can’t tell an American crow from a fish crow by sight, but you can tell them apart by their calls.

The American crow is a baritone that utters a deep-throated caw-caw-caw call, whereas the fish crow is a tenor that utters a higher-pitched nasal call with a hiccup sounding CA-hah, CA-hah or a monotoned cawhr-cawhr.

Fish crows often soar in the air, as opposed to the usual direct flight of American crows.

Just remember, accurate identification is not “as the crow flies” but as the crow calls.

Gary Clark is the author of “Book of Texas Birds, with photography by Kathy Adams Clark (Texas A&M University Press.) Texasbirder@comcast.net .