It's your membership in Maine Audubon and your county Audubon that enables us to put on these programs. So we greatly appreciate your membership and support. And if you're not a member, we're delighted to certainly have you consider being one. If you live in your county and you become a member of Maine Audubon, you are then automatically a member of your county Audubon. So it's a good two-for-deal, an excellent one. So before we get to tonight's program, I'll just mention briefly that we have another exceptional program lined up for next month on Tuesday, March 16th. At same time, 7 p.m., we're going to be joined by Edwin Scholes, who is the leader and project leader, project founder of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Birds of Paradise Project. And he spent the last 20 years or so documenting in the field all 42 species of birds of paradise, mostly in New Guinea and that part of the world. And it should be an exceptional program. So please join us on March 16th as well. And tonight, we have a program about a bird that is not quite as colorful as Birds of Paradise, but still a fascinating bird. It is the American crow. I think some fish crows thrown in as well that have been roosting every night during the winter for many years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. And joining us tonight for this program are Bob Fox and Dana Duxbury Fox, who we are delighted to have with us. Bob was co-author of the 19th, excuse me, 2013 definitive work, The Birds of New Hampshire, that documented the then 427 species of birds that had been observed in New Hampshire. He was also involved in the founding of the Manomet Institute, a wonderful bird science and conservation organization. Dana has been a birder for decades as well. They've both been birding for over 50 years. They've observed the number I saw probably higher now, 6,500 species around the world. Dana's also been studying loons for decades. And we're delighted to have them here tonight and talk to us about this amazing crow roost phenomena. Couple of last notes. After the program, we'll be having a Q&A. So if you have any questions you'd like them to take a crack at, please feel free to hit the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and type in a question at any point during the program. And one last plug as well, our standard monthly plug, keep your cats indoors. Your birds and bird of friends will greatly appreciate it. And now, so without further ado, I'd like to turn it over to Bob and Dana and proceed with the show. Thank you very much for being with us here tonight. So if you just hit share screen. I'll go back here and do this. Sorry. That's okay. We're getting there. Just hold a second. Yeah. We're enjoying the shot of you and Bob. Oh, well, that you don't know need. Okay. Share screen. Here we go. Alrighty. Good. Good. That looks great. Fine. I will see you with some questions at the end of this program. Thank you very much, Bill. We really appreciate it. And we are so appreciative that so many of you have turned in tonight. Bob and I are here to talk about those awesome crows of winter. And they're really corvids during COVID. I with my Massachusetts accent often pronounced COVID is COVID. So it just works out very well. But tonight we're going to share with you this this wonderful experience that we have had over the past few years. Our goals tonight are to observe the crows to study and document their staging and roosting behavior and to share this awesome experience with others. This is an outline of what we're going to talk about tonight. Crows are not what are called corvids, major features of crows, the crows in Massachusetts and Maine, the history of this of winter pro roost and the Lawrence crow roost. Would like to start out with some artsy things. It's interesting that this first picture to the left was one of the first pictures that we can find in the US of a crow. It was listed when Alexander Wilson actually depicted it as Corvus Carone, which is the European crow. At that point, they had not identified it as a separate species. And over on the right, you can see his fish crow, and he was the first one to describe it when he later on, oops. Next we have the pictures of Audubon and Fuentes. You can see that Audubon depicted the American crow in 1833 and two years later, the fish crow. Fuentes depicted these in 1923 of the American crow and the fish crow. It's interesting to watch how these people depicted birds as time went on. Van Gogh actually depicted crows over these wheat fields in an 1890 painting. And Winslow Hummer in 1993, 1893 depicted crows over this fox in his painting called Fox Hunt. Moving much further afield on Echelbury in 1951 depicted crows. But I love this. Don't you love this, Rudy? Hirstel Meyer in 1990, it looks more like a raven, but look at the boots on this bird. Isn't that fun? Barry Van Dusen has produced, who is an artist in Massachusetts and is illustrating quite a few field guides these days, has produced some of these paintings of crows. This one is now in my personal collection. And now Bob is going to share with you information about the family of birds.  We normally don't have audiences quite this big, but I think it's wonderful that that number of people are out and interested. First talk about COVID is a family. There are three parts that we know about in that family. The Jays, you don't think those are part of them, but that's one part. The bad parts are a second part. And then a third part are the 40 species of crows and ravens. Things that we're going to talk about for the rest of the evening. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Sorry. All right, sorry. Well, while she, I think you can hear me while she's getting organized on getting this next picture up. The, the scientists use a lot of different names for the different levels of crows from the largest down into the small species. And so those names of them, that's not worth worrying about. But as you start to get used to the idea of how they lay, and that's what we're going to get into here in just a minute. They, the original crow tribe, if you want to call it that, the largest element that includes the crows was a some birds that ended up on Australia, interesting enough. And as Australia was on a plate back 50, 60 million years ago, drifting across the Pacific, it came into the area of Southeast Asia. And when it got close enough to the continent, this whole family just jumped off and landed and settled in there. And that's the first time they really decided to divide up into various elements, and that's coming along in just a minute here, I hope. Anyway, so this is a little tricky and the map that I'm going, I'm going to use a map first and then I'm going to use a word slide to go back over because it takes a little while to get used to it. Here's the map now. And if you see down there, you can see Australia down there. And you can see it is sort of moving up towards Southeast Asia. And we're going to start with the black arrows that come off, because the ancestors are that first black arrow that comes over and landed in Southeast Asia. Then as you can see, it began to radiate and two groups that came off went to the left and one went down into Africa and the other came over into sort of North Central Europe. And so that was a major move. Now, there's a third arrow coming out from there and that's the interesting one perhaps for us because that is the Jays. Remember, I showed the picture of the Jays a few minutes ago and that's how the Jays evolved. They moved north in Asia, crossed over what is the Bering Sea now. But remember, this was during the Ice Age and a lot of the water was on the land and so this was a land bridge and things couldn't go right across like from one tree to another. So the Jays came across and the arrow shows you them coming down through North America and they actually came down and there are a lot of Jays in Central America and even a few down in South America. So that was a very healthy move at that point. Now, the next move is the Central Group that was spawning all of these things gradually moved up in Asia and now going on to the red lines and you see three red lines also to merge or start up there. The first one again, as that group of Corvids was starting to evolve, had a group that went over into the Europe and African area from there. And a second one came south which is quite surprising. It went back and settled down in Australia long after the parents had left. But the third one is the one that we want because as you see that like the Jays goes up, crosses over and comes down into North America. Now, when it got to the very north in Siberia there was one bird and they split into two. One went back to Europe, the Koran that we were talking about earlier and the one that crossed over into Alaska, it became the American crow, the one that we all know. And you can see it came down and settled all of North America. Also, as you wonder what happened to the Ravens, the Ravens followed along very shortly after and managed to cover the surface between the very northern part of Eurasia and North America. They stayed there, limitedly working down into the lower parts. So while we're waiting for the next slide to come up, I might say back in the 1980s, this map was created back in the 1980s by the things. OK, we have another thing. It's sort of a regret of what I was just saying. 53 million years ago, that's a long time ago, as Australia was moving close to the northern landmass of Southeast Asia, the ancestral COVID. A million years ago, the family of COVIDs, called COVIDEye, evolved in Northeast Asia. And 17 and a half million years ago, I mean, time is going by fast, the genius of crows evolved in the Paleotic, where the little red lines did. Five billion years ago, the American crow evolved in Siberia and then radiated into North America. And four plus years ago, the fish crow evolved farthest down in Asia, but came up and crossed as did the American crow. But instead of staying just in North America, it came down to about the Mexican border and went across, so the fish crow developed for us down in southeastern United States. And as you know now, we're starting to move up into North America. This is a picture that Dana and I took when we were over in Buchan. If you want to see a large-billed crow, this is technically a large-billed crow and it certainly has a large bill.  Those are Rotor Dendrons. Buchan is loaded with species of Rotor Dendrons. And that's one of our other hobbies. We have about a hundred Rotor Dendrons kicking around our house outside and we're running a test on them. Here's some facts about crows that I think we will find interesting. Crows are a genus, that's the smallest group, of the family called corvids. The species of crows have in general similar body shapes. They look alike. They have a strong stout legs that you can see by the little picture up there. They are well-clawed and very grasping feet. They can grab almost anything. They have large heads and of course there are a lot of brains in there but a very distinctive bill. And so that is one of the things about all the crows in the world. Crows have been noted in most of the American Indian cultures because they would hang out around them. The American Indians appreciated the humor and the interest and the whole behavior of crows. And so they always kept recognizing them. They are highly intelligent. They're very, I'm always surprised at some of the things they do. They can outsmart us, I'll tell you that. And they are very social, meaning they like to do things together. They have, in part of their life, they will have a family and the parents will, there'll be two parents, there'll be probably two young. And then the second year, the parents and that first group of young, those if they haven't gone off in their room will stay and help the parents raise the next thing. So it's not uncommon for if you have a crow family around, there'll be four or five birds. The things that are most interesting tonight that they are cooperative breeders, which I just explained, but they are communal winter roosting birds. And that's what we're gonna talk about for the rest of the evening. Oh, I'm still talking a little bit more how you tell them apart, which is I think a good idea. These obviously are American crows. These are gorgeous pictures of the shows. You can see on this American crow, take any of the three of them. See the pantaloons as they like to call them. The little black feathers that come down to the joint. That's characteristic. Now see how heavy a bill it has, a very thick, heavy bill. And of course, those big legs and those big feet. So those are good real pictures of crows. Now here is the fish crow. Frank Rickstuber was taking some pictures of them and this shows them. See on either picture here, the tiny feet. See how tiny they are. How short the legs are. And notice the bill is not nearly as big and heavy as the other one. And we'll get on to some other difficulties, but they are necessarily small. You will be able to see fish crows, not commonly now, but they are coming up in Maine and every year you'll be seeing more of them. So you want to learn how to tell them apart. Fish crows are smaller and have thinner bills. Look at the pictures, including the one on the upper right hand corner, which is the best thing. And the other one that's over there, the left hand one of the left hand top picture there. See how thin the bills are. See how short the legs are compared to the American crow on the right. The fish crows don't have any of those pantalooms like things hanging down to their knees. And fish crows sit and add a more parallel to the ground. In other words, an American crow has its head up and he's sort of almost looking up over the next wave, but the fish crow is at the back is sometimes almost close to being horizontal when you see them. American crows do, when they're wandering around, the American crow will take one step and if it's with a fish crow, the fish crow has to take three steps to keep up with it. They're cute to see. And we often see them now, you can probably see them in Maine if you do them. This particular set of pictures by Louis Bivier shows the fish crow on the right being chased and notice the size of the feet. And the bill on the left. And notice the side of the American crow on the right there with their huge feet, big wings and a big, heavy bill. They are different and you'll be able to tell the differences. This is just a little picture that we took when they were moving north one April and you can see them out in this sort of rough area here in Lawrence and you can see a couple of American crows standing big and with their heads right up. And in the background, you can see most of the birds there are fish crows and that small sized load of the ground, horizontal look to them. They're quite distinctive when you get to know them. And now I'd like to share with you some information about the growth in numbers in Massachusetts. We see here from a breeding bird survey of both the American crow on the left and the fish crow on the right, the number changes. You can see that in about 2000, you had a great drop in the number of American crows. This was due to that despicable virus that attacked the crows at that point. They have been increasing in numbers since then, but for the fish crow, you can see this very rapid increase in this area of the world. Here's Christmas count data. And again, you can see the drop there of the American crows, but again, the sort of stabilization of them, but that dramatic rise in the fish crow numbers. I've been trying to find out more and more and see crow migration myself. And this year, the end of October, I was sitting at the Woodmont Orchard in Hollis, New Hampshire. And I observed for the first time crows migrating. They came across the street from my left. They went across the road up to my right and over the orchard and disappeared to the Southeast. But amazingly, that's at that same time, there were people on Mount Wachu said hawk watching and they recorded in their non-raptor part of their report that that particular day they had had this extensive large number of American crows. And I then went and calculated the direction from the Woodmont Orchard to Mount Wachu said, also the distance and saw that the crows that I was seeing an hour later would have been down at Mount Wachu said. And in contacting the hawk watches, I was able to calculate that there, the time that they had seen it was the same time that I had. One interesting thing about that, we counted 1,200 crows coming across the fields and heading towards there. They had 1,200 crows at the road. You talk about nailing down something that really sort of fits together. That was an amazing day in the field. This is quite a busy overhead here for these migrating crows in Maine. Bob gathered some of this data from both Palma and Vickery's books. And I love the one in the 1900, the first one where it was 10 rods wide and took a quarter of an hour to pass over a given point and the rod was 16.5 feet. Also under the last example, fish crows were first reported at Bowdoin in 1976 and First Bread in 1978. So you can see how they have moved into Maine as well. What is a communal winter road, roost? And why would crows roost communally? Communal winter roost is a place where crows gather in the wintertime. And they come in and they pack in closely, usually on the top in our area of deciduous trees, sometimes in other areas it's coniferous trees. And they do this, it is hypothesized to either learn about food supplies. In other words, where did the birds beside them find good foods that day? Or to avoid predators? Well, the Maine and natural predator of the American crow is the great horned owl. And of course, man has also been a great predator of the owls there. But they feel that if they're in these roosts tightly packed, they can easily, quickly someone can alert them to a predator and they can protect themselves. I was reviewing the history of crow roost and they go back to, the history goes back to the late 1700s. At that time they were rural and they, some were very large, particularly ones in the Midwest. But in the 1700s, these crows, 1970s, crows moved into the cities. Amazing brilliance on their part. We don't allow hunting in cities. They had been persecuted in the rural areas. There's a report in one roost where people, hunters went in at midnight and shot until daybreak, purely for the desire of killing the birds, nothing else. I'd like to tell you about a recent study This is a study that was done by Andrea Townsend. It was reported in the ARC in 2018. It was about a crow roost in Utica, New York. She used satellite telemetry, stabilizer topes and molecular markers. And she found that the resident crows, i.e. those are the crows that nested within 16 miles of the city. We say 20 miles of the roost were there. She found migrant crows that had migrated at least some of them as many as 493 miles to the northeast between the latitudes of 44.4 and 48.4 north. And she was able to estimate that 80% of the crows in her roost were migrants. Now, this is, this comes up, this is her study results. On the left in red is that she was able to put a satellite tag on one resident crow. And Utica is up in the upper right. And you can see where the crow went when it was up in the Utica area. But it went down to Clinton, New York to breed and was in and out of Clinton during the breeding season. On the right is the map of the five migrant crows that she was able to tag. And you can see the tremendous distance to the northeast that they traveled to breed. Now, on the lower right is the graph showing the analysis of the feathers. There's a deuterium level that is laid down in the feather of a bird as it is developed on the bird. Crows actually lose their feathers and put in on new feathers in September while they're still on the breeding latitude. So she was able to examine the feathers of the birds that were there under her roost and also the ones on the satellite tag ones. And she could see that the majority of those that she examined were birds that had been put on in a latitude that was far to the northeast. The history of the Lawrence crowries. It was the first recorded in Bird Observer magazine in 1989 and throughout the 1990s, people reported on the Lawrence crows. The first fish crow was reported in that roost in 1994. And all records were from around the Merrimack River in the city. We visited the roost once each winter from 2013 to 2017. But from the fall of 2017, we've now visited the roost over 400 nights during these past four winters. Initially, most nights they staged in a different place first than roosted in the same place. Staging is what they do when they come in from either where they have nested, I'll tell you more about that in a minute or where they have spent the day feeding and they remain there until a certain point. And after it's dark, they move into the roost location. Here's a map showing 20 miles radius from Lawrence. So you can see that the crows that are coming into Lawrence are coming from a tremendous distance all the way over to the coast in Newburyport, down a bit north of Boston, out into Southern New Hampshire and Westford mass, low mass, quite fascinating. Now these are some observations on staging that Bob and I have been deducing. This is something you're seeing that's never been in print yet. So we're gonna share this with you tonight. But we believe that the initial crows that come into Lawrence to stage are resident crows. And resident crows come in from their nesting territories either singly or in small family groups. This was documented by a professor named Kakamai in New Jersey where he had them tagged and could see that the birds left their nesting territories in the afternoon, went into the roost and then returned to the next day. I have a friend here in North Andover who sees this happen on a daily basis. She has a family that nests in the yard next door. They come back every morning. They're there during the day. And in the afternoon, they go into the roost. Many of these resident crows come in early, even pre an hour before sunset. And they seem to determine where they will all stage that night. Fish crows also come in early and they seem to stay together. Some nights we've seen them in different parking lots. In Lawrence, you know, there's a fish crow parking lot or there's a gathering of fish crows. It's interesting how they aggregate when they come in. They're also feeding often during this period on bittersweet buckthorn or crab apples. Later in the afternoon, large flocks of migrant crows come in closer to sunset. They follow flight lines into the city. And... See if I can go back. We've lost a bit there. There's a pattern that we've noticed of when the crows come in. And you can see in October there that we're getting mainly the resident crows. And then the migrants arrive and the migrants begin to leave as late February occurs. And we've been counting the crows and trying to document this from year to year. This is a map showing some of the locations in Lawrence where the birds gather. That duck bridge in the center with that blue circle is the traditional initial roosting spot for the crows. And they may stage anywhere on the north or south side of the river and after sunset, they will move into a final staging area right near the roost site. And when it's dark, now after sunset and after it's dark, they will move slowly into the roost. This is another map showing one year after they had been in the roost for a while. In the end of December, they suddenly moved over to the west onto the ice of the frozen Merrimack River to the west of there. And then they took this tremendous counterclockwise circle up into upper reaches of the city and made a counterclockwise circle and eventually came back along the southern edge of the Merrimack River. This shows you a Google map of the city of Lawrence. You can see how densely it's populated and that one open area up in the top there was that area where they moved to once they left the ice, which is a large three cemetery complex. Here is the, I'm gonna show you now some pictures of their staging. Here they are staging on the north side of the river. Some of them already in trees and many of them, as you can see, peppering the skies above. Here are some very attractive pictures taken by Betty Wiley. It's absolutely beautiful to come and see the crows when there is a sunlit sky and with the clock tower there of the New Balance factory building and the many church steeples that pepper the sky of Lawrence, it makes it very impressive. Here we have a video that I'm gonna show you. This was taken January 13th. That was just taken January 13th of this year. Just a few months ago, seems to wanna show it again, but it's worth seeing. Notice the way the birds sit on the tops of the trees first and notice how this is a, we call this a river of crows the way they go along. It isn't a stream, it's a river and here you get a swirling thing. That's another behavior thing that we like to see. Here are some pictures again taken of that night where the sky was so beautiful of again the church tower and the clock steeple. You can see here are some pictures taken later in the evening. Often some of them will gather on the ground as they are getting ready to slowly move into the roost or they'll be sitting in nearby tree tops. I like this one. This is the tower and a few crows. It was not eight o'clock. Somehow the clock was not working that night properly. Now, one night we were at a not all on a theological club meeting and we mentioned we'd seen 10,000 crows sitting on the ice that night in Lawrence and someone came up to us and said, we'd love to see the crows. Could you take me there? So we took him there the next night. Lo and behold, we went to that exact spot and there wasn't one crow on the ice. Talk about embarrassing situation. But suddenly we saw crows going along above the trees on the southern side of the river. We got in our car and followed the north side of the river till suddenly about a mile out the crows turned at a right angle and moved over us and went up the hill. And they moved up to that cemetery that I showed you. And these are some stills of that. But this is what I wanna show you. I'll never forget this night.  She got that picture. I mean, it's really amazing what pictures you can get. And the crows actually are sometimes staging in the city. This is one taken just the other night early on, just an hour before sunset. And you can see the number of crows here on the ice. This shows where they are. They're west of the Route 28 bridge in the frozen Merrimack River. We were standing in that Riverside State Park location at that point, but we also go down to the Abe-Bashara Boathouse to observe them. Here it is later in the cycle of the evening. And you can see farm, many more crows have now joined the original. These are not taken from the same night, but it is meant to show you how when the crow, the migrant crow flocks come in later on, there is a far greater density of crows. This was taken by Erica just a couple of nights ago from the Boathouse, the picture on the left looking out over the river. And the crows absolutely love the ice. I thoroughly enjoy these two pictures on the right. The above one was a group of crows sitting on an ice flow, floating down the river. They were happy as pigs in muck and they just were floating along. Below it is a picture of an immature bald eagle that the crows were very disturbed within harassing. You can see one of them. And these are Bob's pictures here on the right. Now roosting, half hour after sunset, they begin to slowly move into the roost from a nearby staging area. The roost is usually no more than a kilometer from the final staging area. And it's dark and they sit very close together and they noisy at first and suddenly they quiet down. This is a picture taken by Dick Lipsey of the crows. If you look along the upper windows on the left there, you can see crows sitting on the tops of these trees. This is the new balance roost. In this narrow set of trees along the river, this is their roost of choice at the beginning of the winter season. Here again, you can see where they are. Picture on the left is of Mr. Lipsey's again, taken looking with a bit of light in the sky of the pros as they fill the tops of those trees. The picture on the right shows them being coming down almost to the water's edge. Here is another view of Dave Lipsey's there. You can see them how densely they fill in the tree tops. This is a picture of us from up in the cemetery when they chose to roost at the far edge of the cemetery. Here's a tree after dark with the... Notice how the birds are all facing in one direction. They are like a windmill or something of that sort. That shows the direction that wind is coming from. Crows spin up like owls a pellet every two days and pellets were collected and they were analyzed. It's amazing, the first year in 2017 when this was done, the largest volume material was the Asian bittersweet. No wonder that invasive plant spreads so rapidly. There were other pellets with safflower and corn. There were mice, mammals, songbirds. Even one saltmarsh snail, which had to have come probably from Newburyport. And then there were various non-food items. This is Tom French dissecting the pellets he did this. He was at that point with the Mass Fish and Wildlife Group. This is his second analysis, his second year. Again, a lot of seeds this time staggon sumac was more prevalent and various invertebrates and non-food items. Notice that there were small stones and glass in the non-food items. And since they're resting on urban parking lots quite a bit, that's probably not surprising. We have many visitors that have come, hundreds of visitors over the past few years who have enjoyed coming to see the crows. And Will Basad, who's now in Brunswick, I believe the young man on the right. I'm not sure where he's on the call tonight, but I know he has moved to Maine since that picture was taken. One of the things I wanted to point out is that crows are allowed to be hunted in Maine. And there are two periods, February to April and August to September. There's no limits. And crows, the only species that seems to be hunted purely for the pleasure of killing it. I also have been corresponding with various people in Maine about some of the winter crow roosts. And I'd love more information from any of you who have it about others or more details about these. But Louis Bevier was telling me that they've had up to 15,000 crows in the Waterville roost. And in 2012, they had 10,000 at the CBC. Also in Augusta, there were 10,000 seen in 2019 at the CBC, but none this year or this past year. And the crows just weren't within the roost circle. I'm sorry, the CBC circle. And, but they were seen staging on the ice in Hallowell nearby in January. Now in Portland, I've had Mainers sending me information about those that are staging near the Calvary Cemetery. So again, please let me know more about this. You can see in the map of Maine there that both Waterville and Augusta are along rivers. They love to be along a river. There's a roost in Hadford, Connecticut and Springfield mass along the Connecticut. Ours, as you know, is in along the Merrimack. And often there are birds in Manchester, New Hampshire along the Merrimack. So rivers are great places for roosts. Tonight, I'd like to read you a poem by Mary Panade, Mary's from Boston. It seems that poems are in vogue at this point. So expert town crier, I am great, guard extraordinaire. Nothing but nothing gets by me without note. Sure, rock on tour, I am wise to wall. Ever certain, ever free, glossy, bossy, braggadocio. Is there anything, anything at all? I do not know. And I love this illustration on the left, which was in an article in the New York Times about agriculture, but just seemed to fit my fancy. So we'd love to have you join us next winter at the roost. If you can make it even this year in the next couple of weeks, they're still there. And we certainly wanna thank David Doubleday for inviting us to the York County Audubon for hosting us and to all of you for watching. We are Dana and Bob and we're in nothing over. That's my email. So please let me know if there's anything more that you'd like to know. I turn it back to Bill and Nick. Good, I'm actually not sure if Bill is back. Okay, good, I didn't know if he made it back on. So Bill, I'll let you handle questions. Okay, there I am. Well, thank you very much. That was very interesting. I have a few questions here. We'll start with a critical one, which is how do you count them? With difficulty, but I'm gonna let Bob describe that because that's something that he loves to do. And he's the official counter for this roast. It's a skill that you learn. It's sort of like playing the piano. Anyone can pick away at it, but to get good, you have to practice a lot and have some technique. I was taught by a person by the name of Ludlow Griscombe who was a professor at Harvard when I was there and I was head of the undergrad bird club. So we taught the whole group how to do it. What you do is learn to count by numbers. So let's assume you had a hundred dots on a piece of paper, you would look at it quickly and say there's five together and then there's another five and a third five. So it's sort of like cutting out groups of five and you go through the flock quickly and see how many groups of five you get. And then you maybe increase it to tens and you can eventually get up to 25s. The higher you get though is the greater your chance of error but nonetheless, as you practice, now a hundred dots on a page is not any problem. You turn the page, you look at the page for four seconds and have to count it. But when you get four or 5,000 dots, let's call them crow sitting in some trees or on a barn or on the ice somewhere, it's a lot harder to do. And so you have to develop this skill so you can do it and do it fairly rapidly because they don't give you, if they're flying by you, you have to be at the same speed they are or you miss them. And using a clicker is a good way to do it. And you don't have to remember 100 or 1,000 number you're onto, you just click it along and keep your concentration. It is a concentrated thing, anyone can learn it. I've taught it to people that I didn't think until one bird from another and it works but it's simply that kind of a skill. I'm willing to teach anybody about it or show them how to do it in more detail if you're interested. I was talking to Brian Harrington who is the red knot man from Manimat. And he was saying that he uses something like a app called wildlife counting and when he is going out with his people to count shorebirds, they often practice with that to try and hone in their skills to improve on the accuracy of doing it. I might add a post script to that. The way I like to check is to find another counter. You know who these people, they're scattered around everywhere and I'd like to count and have them count side by side. And then one of us says, oh, we write down what we got for a count. If you are in that league, you are going to be probably within 4% of each other and somewhere between your 4% is probably the actual number. So that's the way you go. So when we count, we do that. We don't take someone that has another one has a thousand and a hundred and say, well, we'll compromise on 500. That's not counting. That isn't even estimated. That's foolishness. People do it, but it doesn't tell people what it is. You've got to do it with people. You can practice with people. Frankly, it's good. It's a good thing to do and it's a fun thing when you learn how.  Well, that's the thing, Bill. The roost is remember when it's dark. Yeah. So most of the counting of any crows in a winter situation is done, in my opinion, during the staging. And often the crows roost in an obscure situation where you may not be able to see them. In Lawrence, you have some ambient light from some of the buildings in that to give you a little bit of help, but and what we discovered this year, much to our surprise is that the birds also move into the roost very slowly. I don't know of anyone who has actually counted the roost, you know, every 10 minutes, every hour or whatever and tried to find out what the pattern is of crows entering a roost on a particular evening. But they don't enter it, we discovered all at once. And so you have to be there over a period of time in order to get any true from the roosting part of it. We've been counting them as they're going into the final stage. One of the slides that didn't come up there, it skipped it on mine was the numbers we've seen over the past few years. And as it turns out, we found that as they move up the river over the bridge, you can count them if you're working well at it and experience in counting in this river of birds that come over you. But that's in a staging. They were moving from their main staging area to the final staging area. And in one time, that was taken by a guy we call Bob and Bob took those pictures one night. He was out counting with me another night. He is a good counter and we counted up and I said, well, how many you have? And he said, well, you know, 20,000, maybe a few birds more. And I said, I'm at 21, 20,200. That's what you get when you get good counting. He's talking about the video from the garage roof that I showed. Okay, I have another question. Do American crows and fish crows, are they known to interbreed at all? Not that I know of. Not that I know of. They're directly quite separate. And do crows have regional differences? One questioner asked about, referred to a book by Jennifer Ackerman about the intelligence of birds and wondered whether New England crows are different in any way from crows elsewhere in the country. I know that the famous story by Professor Masloff of University of Washington in Seattle where he was going to do an experiment on the crows on the campus. And they decided to put a mask, it was a Neanderthal man's mask on the researchers that were going out to capture these crows and do something to them. And John Masloff has told me that generations later those crows are still passing on to their young. The information that anyone that looks like this Neanderthal man, in fact, if you put that mask on you will still be absolutely harassed by the crows on that campus, although that was years and years ago now. So crows have a very, very strong memory. There's a story of hunters in the Midwest who would go into a blind as a group. The crows supposedly could count as the crows, the hunters left there and they wouldn't go back there till all the counters had left. I'm not sure what that's apocryphal, but I do know that a story from June Aga Chamberlain who was a crow researcher on Cape Cod said that they knew her appearance, they knew her car and they would respond accordingly depending upon what they had done. Bob and I are, or I am certainly hyper cautious. I want to observe the birds, not disturb the birds. So as often as I can, I won't even get out of the car. They probably know our car. They say, here they come again, but we try to observe them and not change their behavior because we were there. I have one example. You talked about intelligence of the birds, in extent, and what they would do, the Masalophic experiment could happen here or anywhere, but there's a crow species in New Caledonia that it sort of put intelligence ahead. It can design tools, it can take a stick, sharpen it or pick the right stick and use the stick to dig it a hole and bring out food and this sort of thing. And so some of the crows are that intelligent. Most of them are not, but I still think they're smarter than we are because they can keep doing a lot of things that we can't figure out about them. Right. A question that might be of concern to people in Lawrence is what volume of excrement, for lack of a better term, is produced by the roost each night? Does it, is a cleanup required? Well, you remember that picture of new balance and the trees along the river? When they're in that roost, all is well because they are in a narrow set of trees along the river and there's no one living there or going there almost on a daily basis. So that area, they are not bothering the citizens. And fortunately, last winter, they were suddenly, they were disturbed, I believe, by people who were out on the bridge near the new balance roost on November 3rd. And they suddenly left there. And until the 19th, they were just all around. They were on the ground. They just couldn't seem to settle in, but they weren't gonna go back into that roost because there had been people with tripods and long big cameras and they were on the bridge for hours. And I think the crows equated those people with hunters and they've had such a persecution from hunting that they never went into the roost again that winter. A few weeks ago, we had a couple of birders wanting to see the things. And so the four of us got under one of the stagings which moved out and it was in a whole group of trees. And that was nice. You could look up and get appreciated. And that was good until we stopped and went away. I had about 40 droppings on my car. I had three or four on my clothes. We had to wash everything we had on because we were standing out and washing them. Yes, and you don't stand under a flock of crows. But once they had moved, last winter when they took that unusual move early, they moved to an area where there was no housing, no people. And in the other two years, they have moved around every night. So they haven't created a real harassment. And the Department of Agriculture has the legal authority to kill them if not harass them. And so that is not a good thing if they are using the same roost within a urban area. I know the city of Gloucester two years ago brought in the Department of Agriculture to harass them. And I don't know whether they even have a roost there anymore. Well, I'll wrap up with one final question, which is, could you relate the most amusing or interesting anecdote you can think of in your observation of crows? All right. Okay, it's a funny one. It was a time like now when snow was plowed up a lot and there was an area in the parking lot along the river with it was a parking. So it was well lit up, which made it rather interesting. And I was looking at that and there was, it was quite late, the crows should have been in their roost or staging somewhere, but these were standing around a dozen crows and they would get to the top of the snow pile. And I thought, well, what's next? They slid down it. And I thought, well, that was an accident. They slipped. They walked around and went up and slid down it again.  I think the most embarrassing was that story I related about telling someone, I was going to show him 10,000 crows sitting on the ice and there wasn't one, but yeah. So if there's anything that anyone asked you for Bill, please just let us know when we'd be happy to help. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. As everyone can see on the screen, they've put their email address. So if you have questions, you'd like to send them, they'd be happy to try to give you an answer. So thank you again to everyone for joining us tonight. And we hope to see you next month, March 16th. Good night everyone. Thank you Bill. Thanks so much. Thanks Nick. It was fun.


Here in Jomam, RCRC has been providing satellite phones for the refugees. It's only two minutes per person, but that allows many people to have this opportunity to call their relatives wherever they are. The South Sudan Red Cross Volunteer speaks the language, they understand the culture, and it's really a help to have them. I am very happy to have these people here, because there are some of them who are people who are missing. They come from outside of Habashah, they come from here, and they are all very good people. The important thing is that we can talk to them, talk to them, communicate with them, and share with them. When the phone is ringing on the other side and you can see the girl calling her parents, it's a pretty good feeling. Thank you.


The People's Democratic Party will begin the sale of nomination and expression of interest forms for its national offices on Monday. The party's timetable and shadow of activities for its national convention shows that the forms will be on sale until Friday and the party's national secretariat. Every member who picks up a form has until Saturday to submit it. The screening of aspirants will take place on Monday, October 18, while appeals arising from the exercises will, the following Thursday, be listened to. The application of names of all clad aspirants has been slated for Saturday, October 23, while the National Work and Committee meeting for the adoption of publication of delegates list will hold on Monday, October 25. The National Legislative Convention itself is scheduled for October 30 and 31 at the Eagle Square in Abuja. The PDP expects no fewer than 4,000 delegates on those two days.


Again, called social support availability and executive function in the baseline cohort of the Canadian longitudinal study on aging and let me now please introduce our speaker Emily Retter. Emily is a research associate and future PhD student at the University of Waterloo School of Public Health and Health System. Her research interests include social support, loneliness and social isolation and the impact of these constructs on cognitive function in aging population. So, we welcome Emily today and I will turn it over to her. Thank you Jennifer for the introduction. Hi everyone. Thank you for joining me here today. Like Jennifer said, I will be discussing the association between social support and executive function in the baseline cohort. Canadian longitudinal study on aging. So, this is an interesting time to be just looking into the role of social support and social isolation on health. Chances are you're listening to this presentation from your home or from a work that's a lot quieter than usual and you've probably recently been experiencing some disruption to your daily life and rural routines, which may be impacting how you're communicating and connecting with others. And I think though, while we make these important decisions to stay home and physically distance ourselves from others, it's actually a really good time to consider the potential consequences of social isolation on our health. So, with all this happening, why should we be thinking about cognitive function right now? Why is it important? Cognitive function is a collection of mental processes that allow an individual to complete both basic life sustaining and complex tasks and is therefore an important indicator of successful aging. It's important everyday functioning and adaptation to change. And not only is poor cognitive function a problem in itself can also be an indicator of future problems. So, for example, low cognitive function is associated with greater limitations to both ADLs and IADLs, frailty, which is associated with mortality, risk for institutionalization, as well as future dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Of those mental processes that make up your cognitive function, executive function is a key domain and has been indicated as important to successful aging, given its role in the tasks required for daily independent living. Executive function is thought to regulate or control reactions in a given situation while organizing and coordinating a response. It lets you focus on what you need to do when you need to act in a non-automatic way, such as when you're making a decision or shifting between tasks or planning for the future. And executive function is a particular concern for research into cognitive decline because it involves so many different areas of the brain to complete complex tasks. You can imagine if you have a problem in one area of your brain, it could impact the whole process. In general, most people see a worsening of cognitive function over time, although there's great diversity in the amount of cognitive decline each individual may experience. Many risk factors have been found to increase or decrease both the risk and the timing of declines in cognitive function. While some factors such as age, sex, and genetics are not under individual control, many relevant demographic characteristics and lifestyle exposures are considered modifiable, such as socioeconomic status, which includes education and income, physical health issues, such as chronic conditions like diabetes, as well as various lifestyle factors. However, most of these potentially modifiable factors would have to be altered decades before symptoms develop. So, there's a real push to find factors that can be buffered in mid to late life. Social support may be one potential area of intervention for those who may be at a greater risk due to non-modifiable or early life modifiable factors. So, what is social support? Social support is a very complex topic consisting of many different concepts and definitions. At the macro level, social support can broadly be divided into two categories, structural or objective support and functional or subjective support. Structural support refers to objective measures of support, such as marital status, living arrangement, number of friends, relatives, and neighbors. While these forms of support are easily measured and thus more commonly used in previous epidemiological research, structural support may not fully account for how much support the individual actually perceives themselves as having and whether they view that support as important to them. So, for example, a person could be married, have a big family, friends, neighbors, but not feel supported by any of them or a person could be married, but they're supposed to live in another country. Alternatively, a person with a very small social network may feel that their social needs are met. This objective side of support is addressed with the second category. Functional support is a subjective rating of the level of support that individuals perceive as available to themselves and is based on the perception that when social resources adequately or inadequately fulfill their specific social needs. Measure will be discussing social support availability falls into the second category. While there is some inconsistency in past research, generally high social support is associated with higher cognitive function. Satisfaction with social support is associated with better scores on measures of attention, episodic memory, and a lowered risk of developing dementia, whereas low satisfaction increases risk of cognitive impairment and dementia. The somewhat mixed results of past research may be due to inconsistent definitions of both social support and cognitive function, which you can imagine both are very broad topics and can vary quite widely. And two, as mentioned before, many studies have only been able to include structural or objective measures of support, such as marital status, which may not pick up as directly on the level of support people actually have, and that could have weakened the results. So to add to the current evidence of how social support impacts cognitive function, we investigated the impact of low social support availability on one domain of cognitive function, executive function. And we found that low social support availability was significantly associated with low executive function, even after accounting for a wide variety of sociodemographic health and social variables, and that this relationship varied across subtypes of support. So getting into methods, it will come as no surprise that this work was done using the CLSA, an ongoing prospective cohort study of community-going Canadian adults. Participants in the CLSA are recruited into two cohorts, the Tracking and the Comprehensive Cohorts, and the Comprehensive Cohort, which is what we used for this study. Participants complete their assessment at one of 11 data collection centers across seven provinces. For our study, we excluded those who were missing data on any of the chosen variables, as well as those who did not complete their tests at data collection site. For a total analytic sample of 23,491. And only cross-sectional data was available at the time of this research. So our exposure was social support survey from the Medical Outcome Study, which consists of 19 items rated on a scale from one to five. So for each item, participants were asked how often that kind of support was available to them when they needed it. So for example, how often did you have someone to turn to for suggestions about how to deal with a personal problem? Participants then selected an option from one, none of the time, up to five, all of the time, with a higher score indicating greater levels of support. And social support availability can be broken down into several subtypes of support. First, we have tangible support, which is very physical support, such as, do you have someone to take you to the doctor if you needed it? Do you have someone to help you if you were confined to bed? What about help with chores if you were sick? And I'm sure these questions are on a lot of people's minds right now. But what about affection or affectionate support? Do you have someone who shows you love and affection or gives you hugs? Do you have someone that makes you feel loved and wanted? Or emotional informational support? Do you have someone you can count on to listen to you when you need to talk? Or someone to give you advice in a crisis? Finally, positive social interactions. How often do you have someone to get together with for relaxation when you need it? Or someone to have a good time with? And then the items for each of these subtypes are all added together for overall social support, along with one additional item for a total of 19 items. If we look at the distribution of social support in our sample, you can see that across subtypes, people feel they're generally well supported, which is really great to see. As scores on this measure were not normally distributed, however, each subscale and overall social support availability was categorized dichotomously into low support, yes or no. No consistent cutoffs for low support of social support availability were found in our literature for this measure. So we decided on a cutoff of less than or equal to three out of five, based on the distribution of scores. And this was chosen as an indicator of low social support, given the highly skewed distribution, such that only 6 to 11 percent of participants scored under the cutoff on any of the subtypes. And we chose to use an absolute score, three out of five, rather than a relative one, like for example, taking the bottom 25 percent of the sample, so that we had a consistent comparison across subtypes, as well as for comparison across other studies, both our own and outside of our research group. Executive function was calculated using standardized scores on five tests. So scores on all tests are standardized to performance within each test. So the standardized scores are Z scores, which would mean a zero and a standard deviation of one. And then we added them together using this equation here, for an overall executive function score. Stroop is a reaction-based test, so a higher score is actually worse, which is why that Z score was subtracted in the equation and not added. Based on previous literature on cognitive decline and mild cognitive impairment, low executive function was defined as a scores 1.5 standard deviations or greater below the mean. This cutoff was calculated separately in a cognitively healthy sample of CLSA participants. And then that cutoff was applied to our analytic sample to get our two groups of low and not low executive function, which you can see here.  Most of them are based on literature, so for example, age group, education, sex, and health variables are very common in the literature. However, there were some additional variables that had not been looked at, but it was thought feasible that they could impact social support or cognitive function. This included things like pet companionship, which I hadn't seen anywhere else, but was available in the CLSA, so we thought that that could definitely be relevant. So getting to our descriptive results, this is more for interest's sake, but if we look at social support availability by age, we can see that it's fairly consistent across age groups, with the oldest age group seeing slightly greater percentages of those in the lower category. Looking at social support availability and executive function, if we just visually compare the distributions of social support in those with low executive function, which is that bottom call row, compared to those without low executive function in the top, we can start to see some differences already. So immediately to me, I see affectionate support. We can see that a more even distribution in those with low executive function compared to higher levels of social support in those who do not have low executive function in that top group there. Definitely more five out of five scores in that group. And positive social interactions as well pops out to me that a lot more people in that five out of five highest level of social support among those who do not have low executive function. We look at the distribution of dichotomous high and low social support by executive function. So that's that cutoff we discussed earlier. We can see that for all subtypes of support, those with low executive function have a greater proportion of low social support. And low executive function is that top row there. And then the bottom row is those with not low executive function. And you can see across the subtypes. Yes, it's very clear. If we look at covariates and executive function for the sociodemographic variables, we can see sex is fairly evenly distributed with low executive function. As we look at age, there is a disproportionate amount of the oldest age group in the low executive function group. So 45% of those with low executive function are in that oldest age group compared to 13% in those with not low executive function. Looking at sociodemographic variables again, education and income vary unsurprisingly and very consistent with previous research compared to those who do not have low executive function. Those with low executive function have a greater proportion of lower education, 4% versus 17%, and lower income. So 4% versus 13%. If we look at health variables, a greater proportion of people with low executive function report health and having at least one chronic condition. Although as you can see the amount of people reporting at least or at least one chronic condition is high across both groups. For additional social variables, a greater proportion of people with low executive function were widowed. See, that's not a big group, but 21% of those with low executive function were widowed. And a lot of them don't have pet companionship, just kind of. And finally, for loneliness, a greater proportion of people with low executive function reported feeling lonely all the time. And these results are consistent with the idea that a variety of social resources do impact our cognitive function. For multivariable results, we found that low social support availability was significantly associated with low executive function, but that this relationship varied across subtypes of support. So we used weighted logistic regression models with odd ratios and 95% confidence intervals to assess the strengths of the associations. So for overall social support and each subtype, we ran four models. In the first model, we ran just support in the outcomes, so that's our crude model. In model B, we added in sociodemographic covariates as well. In model C, we added the health covariates. And in the final model, D, we added social covariates. And we do that in stages, so we can see how the association between social support and executive function changes, as we add in different types of variables. And that way we can get a better understanding of the relationship between social support availability and executive function, because we can see what variables are impacting it. So if we start with overall social support, we can see that in the crude model, model A, those with low overall social support have 2.3 times greater odds of having low executive function compared to those who did not have low social support. But as we added more covariates, the strength of the association decreased from 2.31 over to 1.21. And you can see it's a fairly steady decrease, as we added in more variables. By the time we add in all of those covariates in the final model, the lower bound of the 95% confidence interval dips below one, and is therefore no longer significant. However, the positive direction indicates that those with low social support have greater odds of low executive function. And you can see it's very close to significant, it just was slightly, slightly below. For tangible support, so tangible support with that very physical, do you have someone to get groceries for you? Do you have someone to help you if you are stuck in bed? For that sort of support, it was not significant after the inclusion of health covariates. So we can see it started significant once we included health covariates. We lost significance. But there is still a positive association. And when we ran the model separately for men and women, the association between tangible support and executive function is significant for women, but not in men in the full adjusted model. Affectionate support, if you have someone who gives you hugs, that sort of loving support remains significant even when we add in loneliness and marital status and pet companionship. Which is interesting. We can see that those with low affectionate social support availability had 24% greater odds of having low executive function after we account for everything that we threw in. And emotional and informational support as well, do you have someone who can give you advice on a crisis? So significant. And as we can see, those with low emotional, informational support had 20% greater odds of having low executive function even after we account for all those covariates. And finally, positive social interactions was also significant. So do you have someone you can have fun with and have relax with, enjoy, and I would aim with? That was significantly associated with 27% greater odds of having low executive function if you had low positive social interactions. In terms of covariates, in the final model, so model D, the one we have all our variables in, being younger, female, having a higher level of education, a higher annual household income, reporting good, very good, or excellent, so free to tell, and having a pet who provides you with companionship was significantly associated with lower odds of low executive function. So those were good things. In contrast, being older, male, having lower education or income, reporting at least one chronic disease, having poor self-rated health, and having no pet for companionship was associated with greater odds of low executive function. In terms of the other social variables, both loneliness and being lowed were associated with higher odds of low executive function, so worse, but the results were not statistically significant in those models. So even after accounting for sociodemographics, age, sex, education, income, province, urban, rural residents, health, chronic conditions, self-rated health, clinical depression, and other social variables like marital status and pet companionship and loneliness, low social support availability was significantly associated with low executive function. But as we saw, there were certain subtypes that were significant when others weren't. So discussing strength, we had a very large sample which is unique in these studies. We had 23,491 participants. We had a very wide age range. A lot of past research has been limited to 65 and older, but we were able to include adults in midlife as well. We were able to consider many covariates in one model, which had not been included simultaneously in previous work. So things like pet companionship and even some health variables like self-rated health are rarely included in large studies, so we were very fortunate to have that in the CLSA. We were also very lucky to have multiple tests of executive function, but we were able to combine to get a good measure of a single domain of cognitive function. A lot of studies aren't able to get that specific, so they'll usually have an overall test of cognitive function or they won't be able to get down to the domain level, and that's one reason we see so much diversity in the research in terms of quality results. We were able to include both objective and subjective measures of health as covariates, which again is quite rare in big studies. And most importantly, we could look at a subjective measure of social support availability, which is often not available. So as I said, a lot of studies will collect information on marital status or living arrangements, but a lot of them don't have that measure, so we again were very fortunate that the CLSA thought to include that in limitations. The heterogeneity of the sample increases the risk of confounding factors that we could not account for in the study. The CLSA excluded people with cognitive impairment at baseline, which is, although a limitation, is also supportive for our research for the association between social support and cognitive function, as we still found significant results even with that bottom level of people removed. So within a fairly cognitively healthy sample, we still found that those with lower work executive function had worse social support availability. In terms of selection biases, all participants in the comprehensive cohort come from within 25 to 50 kilometers of 11 data collection sites. So we're only really getting a snippet of the population and that could hinder our generalizability. And because the CLSA is volunteer based, it can be expected there is some self-selection biases, which is particularly relevant for this study because people with higher levels of executive function and higher levels of social support were probably more likely to sign up for study. Finally, only baseline cross-sectional data was available at the time of the study, so we cannot investigate temporality or causation. However, this is being addressed by our ongoing longitudinal work, and I myself am hoping to continue this as part of my PhD. So implications and future directions. Our results indicate that social support availability, particularly affectionate, emotional, informational, and positive social interaction subtypes may be beneficial to cognitive function in middle-aged and older adults. This research adds to existing evidence that psychological and social factors play their role in later life, although social factors are not often prioritized as an indicator of later health. I would doubt that many doctors ask, you know, do you have support? Do you have friends? Do you have family? Et cetera, et cetera. Our results indicate a potential benefit of late social support interventions for cognitive function decline. So strategies directed toward increasing awareness of and access to available social supports may be one potential buffer against age-related cognitive decline. And current services are often directed at increasing tangible support. So for example, meal delivery programs like Meals on Wheels are very tangible support. Yet this is the only subtype of support that was not significantly associated with low-executive function. So there may be room for additional services aimed at increasing other forms of support in order to prevent cognitive decline. So for example, programs that facilitate communal gatherings and relationship building so that people can have someone to relax to or relax with. Someone to give them advice, those sort of things. And I very much recognize that that is easier said than done at the current time, although I'm thinking there's a lot of people working very hard to figure out how to do that in this day and age. Given that social support remains significant, even after we considered all those different variables, we should be considering the health effects of social isolation during times of social and environmental change that can leave a person vulnerable to isolation and limited social connections. So normally in older adults, this could mean during retirement, you know, you're using a lot of connections. Or when children move away, or when you're downsizing houses and moving to a new neighborhood, or the deaths of friends and spouses these times, or perhaps a social support intervention may help buffer any cognitive hits during that time. But this is also something that we have to now consider while living in prolonged isolation during a pandemic. And I would really love to hear your comments and ideas on that, of course, in the chat. So, acknowledgements. Funding for this project was provided by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. And I would like to specifically thank my supervisor, Dr. Suzanne Tyaz, as well as the research team that I work with, which is led by Dr. Margueritez, and includes Dr. Colleen Maxwell, Dr. Megan O'Connell, Dr. Jean Law, and Dr. Candice Connart. And finally, a real big thank you to the hosts and coordinators of this presentation, Shirley and Jennifer. And now I can take a couple of questions or comments. Great. Well, thank you very much, Emily. That was really informative. And I must say you have a very soft, lovely voice for doing these sorts of webinars. I can see you doing more of this in the future. So hopefully you come back and tell us about your PhD work at some point. Just a reminder, if people can please post any questions that you may have in the cat box, both I will try to raise them, or Emily can read them as you type them. I don't see any just yet. Usually oftentimes people, it starts off sometimes a bit slow as people are shy. I just, one question just to start it off, and this is for my own sake. It's sort of the classic question about what came first, the chicken or the egg. In your, just sort of in terms of background about the overall issue, does executive function often, what's the theory about executive function leading to these outcomes of social isolation you looked at, or is it the reverse where these social factors are affecting individuals executive function? Can you just touch on that? Yeah. So for sure, there's definitely some potential for reverse causation. I'm sure these two both definitely play off each other. One of the big theories I've seen is a stress theory. So stress is obviously very bad for your cognitive function. I think we've all heard that message many times now. And social support kind of buffers that level of stress over time. So when you're going through a hard time, if you're able to turn to others and you have someone you can relax with, you have someone you can talk to, then you're probably going to feel less stress over time. And then you'll take less cognitive hits. That's the big one. There are a few other theories, but that's the stress of offering theories. Great. Thanks. So question from Lauren Bashar. Thanks for your presentation. I'm curious about whether you looked at care use to potentially mediate the relationship between executive function and social support availability. We did not look at care use, but that's definitely something I think in future work would be worth looking at. Because obviously care use is very much tied into social support availability, especially that tangible support. So thank you for suggesting that. And I don't know that you, at least you didn't go over this in your presentation, but did you look at any differences between provinces? I did look at provinces as a covariate. So there was some significant differences. Certain provinces were, did have significant associations compared to others. I didn't want to get too into it just because I didn't have an explanation for it, but there are some differences between provinces. I used Ontario as a comparison group. And I believe Quebec and BC both had significantly higher levels of executive function. That's significantly low. Well, maybe you can come back at some point and talk to us about those inter-provincial differences as a focus of your presentation. What about religious affiliations? I'm thinking up to the questions that we have, and I don't think the CLSA has specific religious affiliations, but did you look at that at all? I don't believe that data was available, but if it was, it was definitely something that we could consider looking at. I mean, there is lots of research on social support and religion. Church is obviously a major support system for a lot of people. So if it was available, we would definitely consider it and maybe in future work it will become available. Okay. And next question. I'm curious if you could differentiate between social, where the question goes, social networks. Where did it go? Social networks, social support, and social participation. It seems that you considered social networks as the structural aspect of social support. How did you measure loneliness? So if you're following along in the chat box, you might find it easier to read some of the questions as well. So, sorry, the question was about how did we measure loneliness? So that was the second part of the question. The first part is, how did you differentiate between social networks, social support, and social participation? So social networks or that structural side of social support. Let me see if I can find the slide. Social support is the objective measures. So structural objective support is that very structural objective, obviously, measures that are kind of factual. So how many friends do you have? What is your marital status? The functional support is how much support you actually perceive as receiving. Like, you have these certain roles in your life. I need someone to talk to, for example, do I have someone who fulfills that role that fills that function in my life? And that is a subjective response. Social engagement is more about your activity within your environment. So do you belong to a church?  Those sort of things. So how engaged you are in the community? We didn't include those in this one just because it was too complex and I don't know how many of those we had available. But definitely in future work, that's something you consider. In terms of loneliness, loneliness is measured from the depression scale. I believe it's the CESD scale, which is why I included clinical depression and not depression symptoms as a covariate because I had to steal the loneliness scale out of there. And it's, I believe it's loneliness in the last week. How many times you felt lonely in the last week? Okay. Great. Just getting a mark replied to an earlier comment. We would not check for mediation and cross-sectional studies due to questions about the utility of conducting mediation analyses with cross-sectional data. And also there was a comment about support supplied by church groups. So I think that that related to the religious affiliations question. So now from Paul Mick, is there any evidence that social interventions can lead to changes in health outcomes in older people? I wonder how difficult it is to change trajectories in older people. I also wonder if intervening during critical events, as you mentioned, is important? There's definitely literature showing that increasing social support does help buffer cognitive function, especially in women and health in general. I believe there's, I don't want to, not my specific area, but I believe that there's evidence for cardiovascular disease and depression and diabetes. Social support helps buffer that. Don't quote me on that. I think definitely there's a benefit to offering social support during negative events or events where you might be at risk for having lower levels of support. So for example, retirement would be a good time that there could be some way to offer a buffer there. I know a lot of people lose a lot of their support when they leave work. So finding ways that people can connect to other means would be a really useful thing, I think, to both help people have better social support and to potentially improve their cognitive function over time. Great. So Julian Sayle says, great presentation. Thanks. As executive function decreases, latching on to friends and helpers can become obsessive. Even a hug can become seen as an expression of love. So people start to back off. This of course exacerbates the situation with how executive, with low executive functions, sorry. How can one best deal with this? So how can one, if I'm interpreting this correctly, how does one increase social support while executive function decreases? Is that what I'm... Yeah, I think answer it like that and maybe Julian can clarify if that's not the way the question was intended. Okay. I, just from personal, obviously that wasn't covered in this study specifically, but I think, like, suddenly I would say it would be nice if we all had lots of resources available to us, but maybe that's not always realistic. I'm not exactly sure how people increase their social support while they see declines. I mean, there is an increasing number of social groups. I know a lot of older adult communities and are popping up. A lot more groups and churches are down a little bit, I believe, but clubs are definitely increasing. So maybe spreading out your needs across various people would be good. I know that's difficult, but I think that's probably the best answer that I have. I'm sure there are others who know this a lot better than I do. Great. Well, the good answer. So the next question is, congratulations, Emily. I'm a bit curious about the social support from traditional healers for a loved one with dementia in indigenous communities. How do you consider traditional healer support or care as lower or higher social care for executive functions? Again, very, not an area that I'm well versed in. Definitely something that's interesting. Healers in general are very interesting. I would assume if it's someone that you feel increases your support, someone you can turn into for help in a crisis, then it could definitely increase your emotional or informational support, especially. And we saw that that was significantly associated with cognitive outcomes of higher executive functions. So I could imagine that as long as it's someone that you think supports you and you see that as a support that is available to you when you need it, then I can't imagine that it would hurt. So Mark just points out that the only question in CLSA that relates to religious activity is in the social participation module. And it asks about the frequency of participation in religious activities, which is part of structural social support. And another question from Joe, did you find people belonging to clubs, churches, or senior centers do better than the ones that don't? I did not include those in my study. Definitely we would want to look at I believe there is a social participation module that we can include in future work. Again, I can't imagine that if those are kind of a structural measure. So as long as what you are getting from those clubs does increase your actual support you feel you receive, I would imagine that it would improve. It would be beneficial to you. As long as you're actually feeling that, oh yes, this club does increase my support, like it gives me more resources, I imagine that it would be very helpful. And now a question from Rashmi, thank you for your presentation. Would like to know where do received social support falls into the categorization of social support? Also curious to know if social relationships is a broader categorization that includes social support? So received social support as a concept, it would depend on how it's measured. So if it's a question like feel that I receive the support I need when I or I feel that the support I receive fulfills a certain need, that would be functional support. But if you measured it in an objective way, so I have a caretaker that would be structural support. So it would depend on how it's conceptualized in terms of categorization. Social relationships is obviously this broad broad topic. A lot of these terms are words that we kind of use in everyday language, so they kind of have their own meanings. So when we bring them into the research and we give them an operationalization they sometimes change in meaning. Social relationships I'm guessing would be a broader category than social support because I assume it would include all types of social relationships. Okay, so we have a very practical question now. Thank you for your great presentation. I'm new to CLSA. What resources were useful to navigate the CLSA data to understand it, avoid pitfalls and analysis and interpret it correctly? So maybe you can just give your own insight. And then if a man wants to also follow up with us after, we're happy to point them to some resources or if you want to look around on the CLSA website, you'll also find some resources there. Sure, so one I was very lucky to work with Marca Ramis who's very involved in the CLSA, so I kind of had an insider helping me out. But I definitely found the online data portals were very useful where you could look up a variable and see how it was categorized. There's lots of new documents that tell you how people were recruited and how different variables were calculated and I found those incredibly useful as well. Really once you get into it I think it's quite well organized so I think you'll get a hang of it pretty fast. There's definitely lots of resources and you know the like Mark mentions in the chat the study protocols and questionnaires are posted and you can also always send questions to the info at email if you have additional questions and someone will get back to you quickly about that. And the link to the website is posted as well. There was one final I think a question here just another glowing congratulations to you. Your research is very interesting and practical and very well done very good use of the CLSA data set. So you've had lots of lots of good comments. Everyone is so nice thank you. Great job. So we have probably time for a couple more questions. There's one here from another one here from Julian. Lower executive function tends to to become self-fulfilling downward spiral since people find it harder to provide emotional support and tend to back away. It seems that new types of support need to kick in at this stage but it seems there is less support at this stage. Are there any studies about new approaches for people with significantly declining executive function? I am sure they they're definitely is. We were more for this research we were more interested in just the association and really kind of getting an idea of what types of support was associated with cognitive function. But definitely we would probably in the future look at what sort of interventions pick up on these different types of social support and see you know what are useful at what stage. But yes there definitely is those who have cognitive issues or see cognitive declines could definitely experience a closing in of social supports especially when they need it the most. So there is a bit of a feedback loop there as well. I don't specifically know any studies about new approaches for people with significantly declining executive function but I will definitely consider looking into that in the future. So thank you for bringing that up. Okay and next question is how long it does it take to complete the study? I presume referring to your study despite the large population sample. So you've been working on this for a couple years at least. Yeah mine took about two and a half years but the CLSA was very new at that time and we were just figuring things out. A lot of things have been determined now and so for example the executive function cut off that's a lot more commonly well known versus when I was doing this a few years ago that data had just come out so there wasn't any normative data there wasn't a lot of information on that but there's a lot more available now so it would probably go faster. So I guess to wrap up do you what aspects of your study how do you plan on using this research or do you to continue your PhD studies or what will what will that look like? So I found that when I did this I was kind of expecting I think this is how research goes but I was kind of expecting to get a clear answer and that would solve everything and I would know exactly how social support related to cognitive function but what instead happened was I found that I had so many more questions get generated. So if you notice when I mentioned tangible support I talked about when we stratified by sex there was a significant association for women and not men. I ran separate analyses for all the subtypes but because there was so many interactions and there was so many variables that were coming up as important in those associations it was so complex and it was so there were so many different things happening in these that I'm very excited to kind of figure out how to map things out and look at okay these variables are feeding off of each other to find out this is how the various types of social support relate to cognitive function because it seems to be a very complex web of different variables together. So for example marital status and emotional support seem to be very intertwined and pet companionship and affection support seem to be very they're different definitely different variables but it seems to needed to stratify the analysis there. So there's so many interesting things that came up that not I had not come across before so I'm excited to work on it. Yes that's that's the way of research just uh just to note as before participants start to leave I know some people have started to leave to complete the poll that should have popped up on your screen so that we can gather information about future future webinars. I just see one last question from Kathy Fuller and that was about English versus French data and if you looked at language English versus French data also ESL or FSL could it be that executive function undermines quality of communication and that communication function is key to social function? So cognitive function is calculated separately for English speakers and French speakers they have different norms. We did not account for English as a second language although I do know there's research in my other lab going on about language and cognitive function so there is definitely a relationship there. We did not account for it study though but we did separately calculate executive function based on language so that should hopefully be of some hope to you. Okay well great I think the time has come to end the presentation. We really appreciate appreciate your participation in the CLSA Emily into in the webinar series. I'd like to remind everyone that CLSA data access request applications are ongoing. The next deadline for applications is June 17th of this year. Please visit the CLSA website under data access to review available data. Further information and details about the application process. Again I'd also like to remind everyone to complete their survey under the polling option. If you don't see it beside the chat button please click the drop down arrow and our next webinar which will be in June sorry Wednesday May 27th will be Alessandra Andriaki a recent Master of Public Health graduate from McMaster. She'll present on comparing measures of obesity in relation to healthcare use in adults from the CLSA and registration will open for that next week. And to remember the CLSA promotes the webinar series using the hashtag CLSA webinar and we invite you to follow us on Twitter at CLSA underscore ELCV. So again thanks everyone for attending and to Emily and we'll see you next month for Alessandra's webinar.