A murder of crows takes flight.

The number of American crows, savvy predators known to congregate during winter, has reached an all-time high in San Francisco.

Over the holidays, birders tallied 3,260 crows in San Francisco during the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. That number is an astounding sum, considering in 1984, there were just five crows documented in the city.

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Crows, one of the most intelligent bird species, seem to be adapting to city life in the Bay Area.

“This huge increase of crows all of a sudden is because they’re really good at living in our urban environments and feeding on our trash,” Whitney Grover, the director of conservation for the Golden Gate Bird Alliance, told SFGATE. “Crows are adapting to living in these denser human landscapes better than other birds especially. That can be problematic for the other bird species because crows are predators.”

The Golden Gate Bird Alliance, a nonprofit based in Berkeley, organizes volunteers to........

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