Spring passes into summer, and the dawn chorus, like all things, fades. I still rise before the sun and watch the stars dissolve in the grey morning light, but April’s great crescendo has been replaced by August’s less ecstatic music. Few birds are singing. Now I can hear them speak.
The crows are among the day’s first voices. Besides those of humans, there are no conversations that surround us more. I hear them cawing in the distance as the world wakes up. I ride my bike through town and it’s a strangely silent outing in which I do not hear them. The crows are always there, though sometimes my mind is far away. “Music is continuous, only listening is intermittent,” Thoreau is reputed to have said. Nothing makes the typical intermittency of our attention clearer than a habit of listening to birds. That habit revitalizes an easily overlooked constant of our lives: crows are almost everywhere and you will cross their path today, if you are only paying attention.
I often think the whole point of learning about birds is to turn the unheard and invisible into music and splendor.
Start again from the beginning and look with untaught eyes. I pass by the soccer field and watch the crows walk in the sunlight, note the forgotten luster of their wings. This is no seething mass of starlings or sandpipers; these are twenty individuals, each one marching to her own drum, sometimes approaching others to chat or squabble. A sentinel watches from the fence. A known arrival is greeted with words of welcome and quick acceptance.
Start from the beginning and start with the fundamental: crows are closer to us than any other bird. They are thinking creatures, more like singularly street-smart toddlers than like finches or fence lizards. They are the most truly social species we encounter in the human understanding of the word, social not in that anonymous alliance of convenient conglomeration that is the flocking of most birds, but in years-long families of blood relatives and adopted siblings, of unique individuals with distinct, remembered identities of themselves and those they live with.
Listen closely, right now, and maybe you’ll hear those unshy voices, cawing somewhere beyond your earthbound point of view. Look closer, when you next meet them—that sentinel is watching you, wary but not hostile. Look back into those eyes and see that alert and thinking being. Lift your vision higher and see the tribe she flies with. And as your perspective widens and ascends, you’ll no longer disregard those black marks across the sky, nor note in passing those black birds beside the red and gold ones, but stop to stare into this mirror that reflects the essence you’ve called human.
A bird not like the others
According to objectively scientific measures, crows and other corvids are near the top of the bird world in cognitive abilities, rivaling the traditional “most intelligent” animals like dolphins and the great apes. Recognizing that there is something going on in the minds of crows to explain their actions, rather than just attributing them to instinctive, programmed behaviors, is the first step in reorienting your encounters with these birds.
Crows are not, of course, our only corvids. But they are the most widespread, evidence of a flexibility which is itself a product of their intelligence and social adaptability. Jays are more tied to woodland habitats and in California stick to year-round pairs and forgo some of the advantages of larger tribes. Ravens, the larger and less common of our big black corvids, likewise favor relatively wild habitats and are more often found in pairs, rather than the ubiquitous urban flocks of their smaller cousins. But crows thrive across the varied settings of this huge continent because they exemplify essentially all of the cognitive tools we’ve found in the corvids’ collection of advantages. And so they also thrive wherever you look in California, that scarcely less diverse state we live in.
Some of our best high-level studies of corvids’ mental abilities come from the husband and wife team of Nathan Emery and Nicola Clayton, who have categorized a number of those talents within a useful framework of four representative skills.1 The first two of these abilities are causal reasoning and flexibility, both of which are well demonstrated in crows’ use and creation of tools. For instance, crows will modify sticks, breaking and bending them into appropriate sizes to retrieve food from crevices.2 Crows have also learned to take advantage of our more recent additions to their environment, such as by leaving hard food items to soak in bird baths or dropping nuts on roadways to be cracked by passing cars.
The other two traits that Emery and Clayton identify as emblematic of complex cognition are imagination and prospection, abilities which allow one to use past experience to predict the behavior of others and plan for the future. Some of the best examples of these processes at work come from crows’ practice of caching. Corvids generally are specialists at saving food for later, which is at core an exercise in imagining future scarcity and preparing for it. As with the acorn-planting jays, crows pay attention to the cache locations of others—and who is watching their own prudent depositing. If a bird of their own species or another known species of thieves watches them stow an item, they will re-cache it when the potential thief isn’t looking. Similarly, crows will consider their past experience of individual birds or humans to form expectations of their future behavior. For example, they will mob specific humans who have interfered with their nests in the past, even if they haven’t seen the person in question for months.
For many people, recognition of any kind of thought, of memories and calculation, is a novel enough ingredient in how they look at birds. It changes things, to watch a crow burying something and know that she is not just mechanically accumulating objects, but is evaluating the item’s location, perishability, date of caching, and whether the species and individuals in her vicinity are potential thieves. Our assumption that non-humans are acting out simple instincts comes to be deeply ingrained and hard to remove. But crows are doing no such thing. They are remembering, thinking, and imagining.
We pride ourselves on our cleverness, set ourselves in one category and all other creatures in another. We assume crows are like the others, winged and beaked and thoughtless. Correct this false conclusion: count the crows among the thinkers. We are not the only minds that are awake. There is another thinker in the downtown trees and other students in the schoolyard. They are solving problems and hatching plots, playing games and remembering our secrets.
The crows live here among us and treat our food and structures as their own. We thought ourselves alone and separate, the unique possessors of these streets. But there are two thinking beings in this town that we called ours. We live in double cities, towns of people, towns of crows.
Those whom we’ve heard talk
Raw intelligence is just a starting point. What is most interesting about a mind is not one’s ability to merely solve puzzles, but the ability to communicate, form bonds, and otherwise exist not just as a machine or bundle of instincts, but as a living being with selfhood and agency. In most bird species, social identity is limited: typical birds have a number of distinct, individual, enduring companions in their lives between zero and one. Crows are the exception.
In addition to their lifelong mate, crows will often keep their past offspring around as helpers for some years, as well as welcome other “adopted” birds to their tribe in similar roles, contributing to nest construction and feeding the young. Crows are like us: they conduct their domestic life with a limited circle of known allies, centered around immediate family members, but sometimes including close friends and adopted children. This is part pragmatic sharing of resources to maximize nesting success and part sociability for its own satisfaction. Crows play: chasing each other in games of tag, barrel-rolling on the wind, and exhibiting curiosity and amusement at the behavior of their friends and siblings.
Crows are famous for their flocks, which take numerous forms. In addition to those small groups based around breeding families (ranging from an unassisted pair up to 20 or so members), younger birds not yet ready for breeding will often gather into groups. Urban populations have more of these adolescent associations, made of crows who come to the city to take advantage of the plentiful food resources and opportunities to meet others. Due to the intense competition for local nesting sites, these young birds eventually move out to the suburbs or country when they are ready to breed.3 Crows are like us: they move to the city for the chance to earn a living and meet other young people, but move out due to the desire for space to raise a family.
In the non-breeding season, crows will often gather at traditional night roost sites which may contain hundreds or even thousands of birds. There they can rest in safety and exchange information with others. In the day, the small groups of families and allied intimates fly out to their distinct feeding territories. Crows are like us: they want to meet others outside of working hours, but they learn to maximize their efficiency through economic specialization—you will earn your livelihood more effectively if you know your coworkers and your office and return there every day.
The main impetus of crow society is the same as that of most societies: diminishing dangers and finding food. Their approach to threats is particularly illustrative of the tribal advantage: not only does a greater number of birds lead to earlier detection of danger (the standard benefit of flocking), but crows actively cooperate to drive those threats away. No birds are more adept at the “mobbing” of predators like hawks and owls. But what is most unique about the flocks of crows is how these cooperative efforts combine with a persistent impression of distinct and individual intelligences.
This individuality within a flock is something we know well, but which is rarely found in birds. Part of our biological need for company can be met by the simple sight of proximate persons and a baseline of social acceptance. But there is something else we look for, a congruence of deeper trust and temperament. Like us, crows remember who their friends are and maintain inner circles within a broad society. We are no finches or sandpipers, where any member of our species will do. There are many whom we trust not to stab us in the back, but there are only a few whom we rely on to help us raise our children.
So how do crows behave with those they know the best? The fancy songs and bright colors of your classic courting songbirds are clearly not for them. And their intelligence and memories yield more complex relationships than the blind fixed loyalty of the ultra-monogamous brown birds. Crow partnerships are not a simple matter of a one-time female evaluation, but more of an extended measuring of the substance of one’s aid and personal compatibility. Does he bring me food when I beg? Does he help me build my nest? Does he preen my feathers and rub my beak with his? Does this bird who does not sing speak to me in those low and confidential notes, “soft and plaintive to the ear”?4
It is these patiently developed relationships that make crows who they are. Social patterns lead to the evolution of intelligence as we know it. The birds with the largest brains and highest scores on cognitive tests are those who are omnivorous, live in groups of 5–30 individuals, and maintain life-long pair bonds. Crows belong in all of those categories, making them prime exemplars of what the experts term “relationship intelligence.” The development of such intelligence is not reliant on the raw number of individuals one encounters, but on the length of continuous time one spends with a partner or small circle of intimates.5
We are more like crows than finches and live our lives in prose. I relish the spring music of the birds, but for such clever, busy-minded creatures as we are, golden feathers and a song upon a stage do not suffice. We must have words that pair with actions to know who we can count on: the everyday world of food and threats and problems solved forms the speech that tells me who you are. Do we look down upon the voices of ravens, jays, and crows? Then we dismiss the sweetest conversations our lives have ever known, the assurances of deeds promised and accomplished, that go beyond music’s beautiful but vague suggestions.
I love to hear fine singing, but the crows and I can love only those whom we’ve heard talk.
One Great Creature
And so crows are the thinking birds, and the ones who talk with subtlety to those other birds they know. It is easy to accumulate the list of specific behaviors that crows exhibit along those lines, beyond the capacity of other birds and even our pets, and then to reflect and realize with a certain startled recognition that those are the traits of humans too.
And yet the history of crows and people is a long story of prejudice and persecution. Why did we invent a word like “scarecrow”? For a long time it was standard agricultural practice to shoot crows, assuming them to be voracious thieves of grains and other crops, and even implicating them (incorrectly) in the killing of helpless newborn livestock. This grew into an era of large-scale persecution: people used to dynamite the group roosting sites, blowing up thousands of crows at a time under the banner of agricultural protection. Crows grew wary, learned to recognize guns, and began to colonize the cities, away from the blazing firearms of the farmers. In the race of escalating explosiveness against caution and wariness, the crows won. Look how many crows there are: they’ve largely survived our frontal assaults.
More recently, crows have faced another threat, which we brought them accidentally: they are the bird most heavily impacted by West Nile Virus, which seems to have an essentially 100% mortality rate in their species: American crows have “never survived experimental infection” one study uncompromisingly summarizes.6 Disease is more deadly than all our blustering explosions. Areas of high mosquito and high crow density were quickly devastated after West Nile’s arrival in New York in 1999, with local surveys finding sudden drops of 60% or more within a few years as the virus spread across the country.7 The most recent reviews indicate that crows have suffered the most significant long-term effects of all American birds.
In summary, WNV impacts on bird populations across North America have been sustained across multiple regions in only one species, American crow.8
They did better in cooler or drier areas, away from the mosquitoes that transmit the virus. Some would survive in even the hard-hit regions through the most rigorously enforced of social distancing: when the flocks died out, solitary birds and pairs would continue to be seen as the likelihood of infected mosquitoes finding them dropped. Those hollowed out tribes survived, or moved to more urban areas where food was abundant and chemical vector control cast its protective umbrella. Crows have lived through a pandemic far deadlier than our own.
But, like us, they persist. That plague has been a recent setback after a century of steady expansion across California and the west, with crows increasing their numbers along with human agriculture and urbanization.9 Kira Jane Buxton’s darkly humorous tale of apocalypse, Hollow Kingdom, embraces this virtue of corvid resilience. The novel’s hero, a domesticated crow, gains new respect for his wild cousins as they survive when even humans fall:
Kraai held on to his patience like a top-tier canopy branch. “Perhaps the truth is that the part of you that’s smart and resourceful is the crow part. We’re smarter than you give us credit for… How many of us can recognize a human face?”
“We all can, we all can!” came unanimous squawking from the trees…
“And how many humans can recognize an individual crow? … How many of us do you see crumpled roadside like the squirrels and raccoons?”
“None! None!” cried the avian audience.
“We are soaring shadows, adapting on the wing. We are everywhere on this big beautiful blue and that is the privilege of being a crow, Blackwing. We are not caged, never confined by bars and walls. We build tools and communities and use our mind maps to navigate the world, so much easier now without the electro-smog blurring our flight paths. And we are survivors. We thrived in the hollowing time of trash and plastic, and we will thrive in the New World, as Nature settles her debts.”
So when you see those soaring shadows, recognize our closest cousins on this continent of mute or simple beings. It is true that we are cleverer than most creatures, though it often gets us into trouble. It is true that we can speak, to share knowledge and form friendships where many animals cannot. But the crows do all this too, and so alongside us they survive, filling all the hollows we have made. We shot them down and brought them plague, but still I hear them cawing.
“What a delicious sound!” declared Thoreau. Because the voices of crows still merge their indelible wildness with the sounds of our towns, despite all the dangers we have brought them: “it passes not away.” And because it is speech like ours, though we do not know the words: “I am part of one great creature with him… I can hear when he calls.”
What do I see in those birds of everywhere? I see the deep strength of paired intelligence and companionship, the flock and family reconciled. I see how the social benefits accrue without subsuming the individual. I remember this underlying object of our own tangled corvid ties: the security that allows us still to be ourselves.
What do I see in those birds of everywhere? I see our own familiar pattern: independent yet united, facing the consequences of abundance, but irrepressibly continuing. And so each confident black visage, gleaming with recognition and with play, mirrors back to me a nature of which I shall not be ashamed.
Header photo by Jacob McGinnis
- Emery & Clayton 2004, "The Mentality of Crows: Convergent Evolution of Intelligence in Corvids and Apes"
- "Goal-directed Use of Objects by American Crows," Carolee Caffrey 2001.
- "Causes and consequences of expanding American Crow populations," John M. Marzluff, Kevin J. McGowan, Roarke Donnelly, and Richard L Knight, 2001.
- "Selected Vocalizations of the Common Crow," Dwight R. Chamberlain and George W. Cornwell, 1971.
- "Cognitive adaptations of social bonding in birds," Nathan J. Emery, Amanda M. Seed, Auguste M. P. von Bayern, and Nicola S. Clayton, 2007.
- "Differential Impact of West Nile Virus on California Birds," Sara S. Wheeler, Christopher M. Barker, Ying Fang, M. Veronica Armijos, Brian D. Carroll, Stan Husted, Wesley O. Johnson, and William K. Reisen, 2009.
- For instance, 63% in the Sacramento Valley. "Impacts of the West Nile Virus Epizootic on the Yellow-billed Magpie, American Crow, and Other Birds in the Sacramento Valley, California," K. Shawn Smallwood and Brenda Nakamoto, 2009.
- "Impact of West Nile Virus on Bird Populations: Limited Lasting Effects, Evidence for Recovery, and Gaps in Our Understanding of Impacts on Ecosystems," A. Marm Kilpatrick and Sarah S. Wheeler, 2019.
- "Historical Changes in Populations and Perceptions of Native Pest Bird Species in the West," John M. Marzluff, Randall B. Boone, and George W. Cox, 1994.
Spectacular, beautiful writing! The language alone lifts my spirits. I am partial to Corvids, and loved this treatise on crows. I love their clucks and chuckles and burrs, so musical, and I know they are having a conversation but can only imagine what it is. Thank you for writing this, a spark of light in a rather gloomy week.
Thanks Anne, I’m glad you enjoyed it!
Have you been a writer all your life? Your words and insights are amazing. Thank you Jack.
Thanks Nona! I’ve always liked writing, but it’s only in the last few years that I’ve been practicing more consistently and that my bird knowledge has developed enough to start making these more public stabs at it.
Another wonderful essay and insp[iuration to look – and listen – closer.
Thanks Susan!
Hi, Jack! Always enjoy your articles….Just love crows….I have a crow that visits now & then…his name is Poe! He’s a beauty….Hope all is well with all of you at the store, Candy Gratto
Thanks Candy, all are well here and I hope you are too!
Jack! So beautiful, thank you. When is the book coming out 🙂
I especially love that you have read Hollow Kingdom. I loved that book so much. Although it took me a minute in the beginning. It is a wonderful book and I wish all the mofos would read it! Crows deserve our respect, not our disdain.
You are reaching many people with these columns and essays. My neighbor told me how much she enjoyed your recent article about the scrub Jays. She is not a birder but appreciates the birds we have around our complex.
Ah yes, I loved Hollow Kingdom too. Personally, I was hooked by the beginning when Big Jim’s eye falls out of his head.
Thanks for your comments on the essays – I’m working on the book. Maybe next year!
Absolutely wonderful – thank you again, Jack!
Really nice writing!…so informative and at the same time so poetic.
Loved the artcle on the jays as well…especially the last paragraph…I read it to my class and wasn’t sure to read it as a poem or prose
Thanks so much
David
I’m appreciating crows more and more these days. What do you know about crow’s picking up and caching or “gifting” to humans little non-food items like keys and beads. Is that play?
There is certainly evidence of crows playing with each other, and quite a few reports of crows leaving gifts for specific people, usually those who feed them regularly. It’s hard to know the exact train of thought behind gifting behavior, but it is entirely possible that it is what it looks like: an intentional gift of an interesting item meant to please the recipient.
Thank you! I enjoy all your posts about birds. You’re helping me on my pandemic project to identify more birds by song.
What a beautiful description, and habits of Crows. I never new. Very well written.a
Appreciate your Crow information . We live in Sunset Beach (Huntington Beach, CA). Marvel at the crows
at their ability to have almost a daily schedule….we provide water & sometimes bread pieces. Interested
in continuing to “feed” them or ??
Question: Seagulls out number crows 50 to one but the sea gulls leave them alone ???
Mike Pettite @ mppcorp@gmail.com
I wouldn’t generally recommend feeding bread to any birds (salt is generally not something birds handle well), and many people discourage feeding crows in general, since they are thriving so much without explicit human subsidy. Personally, I think a little moderate feeding is ok – I would recommend unsalted peanuts in the shell as an alternative.
Most birds leave crows alone – they are smart, agile, and quick to summon friends if needed!