This year, my wife was able to discover where the crows meet. We would always see them staging in our neighborhood. There would be literal thousands of them in every tree and powerline by the edge of the canyon. As they cawwed, more would join them from the south. Eventually, one of them would give the signal for flight, and they would take off toward the north.

It turns out that for all this time, they were simply preparing to go to Costco to run errands.