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Cluster · mobbing
Mobbing alarm.
Compressed, urgent caws delivered in rapid sequences, often by recruited pairs or groups targeting an aerial predator. Spectrally rough; tightly packed in time.
v1 corpus · 1 CC-licensed recording · AI narration available
AI interpretation · Mobbing alarm
Mobbing calls are the rough opposite. When a hawk slides overhead or an owl is spotted at noon, crows recruit each other into a chorus of compressed, urgent caws — tightly packed in time, spectrally rough, audibly stressful. Kevin McGowan's Cornell field studies catalogued these recruitment chains: one bird sees, calls; three arrive; ten more follow. Some flocks remember and re-mob the same individual predator for years. Our one mobbing recording captures a textbook moment — a small group screaming down from a cottonwood at a human who got too close. The cluster sits high in the embedding space, separated from territorial by call rate alone.
Recordings in this cluster
One exemplar, real spectrogram, full attribution.
2013-02-10
Corvus brachyrhynchos - American Crow XC121396
Mobbing / scolding153 s · 200 Hz – 8 kHzCorvus brachyrhynchos - American Crow XC121396.oggA small group of crows (10-15) perched above me in a large cottonwood tree and screaming down at me. Periodically one or two would launch into the air and circle above me while calling. Several others flew in to join
Behavioral-context probabilities
What happens when this cluster fires.
- Alarm
- 78%
- Territorial
- 12%
- Recruitment
- 8%
- Other
- 2%
Probabilities are cluster-wide estimates from the behavioral-context classifier in the methods pipeline. Not per-clip — individual recordings sit somewhere within this distribution.
Frequently asked
What people ask about mobbing alarm.
- What is the mobbing alarm cluster?
- Compressed, urgent caws delivered in rapid sequences, often by recruited pairs or groups targeting an aerial predator. Spectrally rough; tightly packed in time.
- How many mobbing alarm recordings does CrowLingo have?
- Crowlingo's v1 corpus contains 1 CC-licensed mobbing alarm recording, sourced from Wikimedia Commons (Category: Audio files of Corvus brachyrhynchos).
- How does AI interpret the mobbing alarm cluster?
- Mobbing calls are the rough opposite. When a hawk slides overhead or an owl is spotted at noon, crows recruit each other into a chorus of compressed, urgent caws — tightly packed in time, spectrally rough, audibly stressful. Kevin McGowan's Cornell field studies catalogued these recruitment chains: one bird sees, calls; three arrive; ten more follow. Some flocks remember and re-mob the same individual predator for years. Our one mobbing recording captures a textbook moment — a small group screaming down from a cottonwood at a human who got too close. The cluster sits high in the embedding space, separated from territorial by call rate alone.
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