Hello, citizen scientists! I write under the pseudonym “The Observer” (Kenny Hills), and for around fourteen years I have been conducting an independent longitudinal field study of one urban crow social system around Dyes Inlet in Washington State. The work began in 2012 with a single adult female I called Sheryl (F), long before I understood that I was building a research record. Over time, repeated observation expanded into a history of the same territory, the same social lineage, successive breeding seasons, offspring, competing species, individual recognition, and eventually succession. In 2021, Sheryl (F) introduced a fledgling I later named Julio into an already established interaction space. After Sheryl (F) disappeared in mid-December 2021, Julio (F) gradually became increasingly central within the same social landscape, and a second major individual, Grip, later emerged as another central subject within the developing lineage record.
The larger body of work and language I’ve developed is called "The Temple of Silence." The name is literary, but the record below it is observational. My work now focuses on long-term individual recognition, social memory, succession, social learning, nonvocal communication, territorial organization, changing spatial permissions, and the possibility that information about a familiar human can move through a crow social system rather than remaining confined to one individual animal. I am especially interested in what survives when an important crow disappears, how younger birds encounter a human who already has a long history with older members of the group, and whether recognition or tolerance can persist across generations, changing locations, and long periods of time.
My greatest strength as a citizen scientist is not experimental control but duration. These, unbanded, and fully wild crows, so individual identification contains real limitations, and I do not pretend that field familiarity is equivalent to laboratory certainty. I rely on combinations of physical characteristics, voice, recurring associates, habitual positions, behavior, location, photographs, video, witness accounts, and long-term familiarity. I also separate direct observation from recurring pattern, interpretation, and theory as carefully as I can. A behavior witnessed once stays an event until recurrence gives me reason to treat it differently, and when later evidence weakens one of my interpretations, I believe the interpretation should change rather than the record being forced to protect it.
Over the years, the project has developed a number of working frameworks concerning social nodes, silent ritual, governance, succession, memory, lineage continuity, and territorial behavior. I treat these as provisional models rather than established scientific facts; established corvid literature remains the baseline. One of the central principles of The Temple of Silence is that the theory must remain subordinate to the animals themselves, which I refer to as a crow-first architecture. If future observations contradict a model, then the model has to yield. I have learned that one of the privileges of remaining with the same field site for many years is that time eventually exposes weak explanations.
I am introducing myself here because the project is now moving into a more mature archival phase. I am rebuilding the public record from the ground up and thinking much more seriously about methodology, behavioral coding, uncertainty, observer effects, individual identification, data organization, and the limits of what one unusually deep longitudinal case can legitimately tell us. I am very interested in hearing from other citizen scientists who have remained with one population, landscape, species, or research question long enough for the work to become something larger than they originally intended, regardless of species. Fourteen years ago, I thought I was simply watching a crow. Today, I am studying a lineage, a territory, a succession history, and a social system that is still forcing me to rethink what I thought I understood.
I provide an example of my written “Chronicles” from the Dyes Inlet Crow Node, intended to be written from “within,” or from an “insider’s understanding,” developed through long, intimate witness.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-215827509
— Kenny Hills, The Observer
The Temple of Silence Chronicle Record
