The crows came back on garbage day. It was eerie. At least a dozen, maybe two, gathered high in a tree in my yard. They were squawking and raising a ruckus.

This was a week ago Monday and as I stood on my deck I wondered if this time they had come not for my garbage, but for me. After all, those birds and I have a history.

For many years, until that glorious day in September 2007 when Madison rolled out those impenetrable tan garbage carts, I fought a guerilla war against an army of crows that tore up and ate the garbage I put at the curb every Monday.

They were fearless, I'll give them that. I would come running down the driveway wielding a seven-iron, screaming like a banshee, and they would react like passengers on a cruise ship ignoring an unruly drunk in the bar.

I had to get right in their faces to get them to leave, and I always had a sense that as they flew away they were thinking: "We'll remember this."

It turns out they probably were. The day after the crows gathered in my tree, causing me to feel like Tippi Hedren in the Hitchcock movie "The Birds," I called Stan Temple, an emeritus professor of wildlife ecology at UW-Madison, and an expert on crows.

"The weird thing was it was garbage day in my neighborhood," I told him. "It was like they were angry that for eight months, they haven't been able to get at my garbage. I know that's ridiculous, but still."

Temple's answer surprised me. While not addressing my particular situation, he said that he and his students had found over the years that crows have an internal calendar that allows them to know when a garbage bin at a restaurant or grocery is likely to be full and ripe for plundering.

"The lids on those bins are closed pretty tight until they're full," Temple said. "They had psyched out which days they were likely to be full. They wouldn't even go look on other days."

I always assumed my ambivalence -- no, say it right, my hostility -- toward crows was a perfectly normal human feeling. Who could like a crow?

Then a few years ago, I was shocked to read a piece in the Los Angeles Times by Deborah Blum, the esteemed UW-Madison journalism professor, in which Blum expressed her admiration for crows.

"Scientists say my hometown of Madison is 'saturated' with crows," Blum noted. "I can see that through the window. On a given day, I can watch crows chase rabbits, rip apart garbage bags, hunt for earthworms, peel up road kill and quarrel over all of the above -- conducting noisy (and I suspect profane) family arguments. They are completely and confidently at home."

Blum admires their toughness and street smarts. She quotes University of Washington psychologist James Ha: "Crows are just really smart, capable birds. They're right up there with your dog."

Further testimony to the intelligence of crows came in a 2006 article by Karen Youso in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "Crows in Tokyo wait at busy intersections for the light to turn red, then place walnuts in front of the car tires. Returning to their perches, they wait for the green light and the cars to clear, then retrieve the nut meats."

Blum, in her L.A. Times piece, concludes: "We should learn to enjoy them."

Now, I am a great admirer of Blum, who won a Pulitzer Prize early in her career for newspaper stories on the ethics of primate research, and has since published several acclaimed books, including "Love at Goon Park," about UW-Madison psychologist Harry Harlow and his work on the science of affection.

Enjoy crows? Curse them, maybe. Fear them. But I picked too many pizza crusts and wet coffee grounds off the curb over too many years to think about enjoying them.

Now I am worried they are stalking me. Youso, in her Star Tribune piece, wrote the following: "Crows can even recognize individual humans."

She found a Cornell University crow researcher who "reports on his Web site that crows recognize him, even when he is far afield, and follow him for peanuts. They even recognize his car, following it down the street. If he doesn't respond with peanuts, they swoop in front of the windshield."

This past Monday, at the appointed time from a week earlier, I went out on my deck to see if the crows had returned to haunt me on garbage day. There was no sign of them. Then it dawned on me. The crows knew Monday was a holiday.

They'll be back.