the genius of crows and ravens, with dr. john marzluff
A COUPLE OF RAVENS have been shouting at each other across the garden each day this spring-into-summer, and their loud-mouthed antics reminded me of a somewhat less bawdy conversation about crows and ravens that I had a decade ago on the podcast with ornithologist Dr. John Marzluff—a conversation I want to reprise.
Possessing large brains for their body size, a knack for social networking that requires no internet connection, and keen powers of observation, crows and ravens are among the big personalities of the bird word.
They are also what Dr. Marzluff calls, “black-feathered practitioners of lifelong learning,” and from him I learned about the capacity of their avian brains and the range of things it allows them to do–from the funny to the daring, much of it almost unbelievable.
Dr. Marzluff is a renowned ornithologist and urban ecologist, and professor emeritus of wildlife sciences at the University of Washington. He is author a number of books, including ones about his area of particular expertise, the corvids—crows, ravens, jays and their relatives. Around the time that we recorded this conversation, I had just read the book he created in collaboration with illustrator Tony Angell called “Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans” (affiliate link), which was the subject of our 2015 discussion.
Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page for a chance to win a copy of “Gifts of the Crow.”
Read along as you listen to the July 7, 2025 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
my crow and raven q&a with dr. john marzluff
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Q. It has been raining here today. We haven’t had much rain in the Northeast lately, though I know you’ve been having crazy, crazy rain in the Pacific Northwest.
A. It is very, very wet.
Q. Looking out the window today, I was thinking: How do birds stay dry, anyway? There is always a question about the birds; I have infinite questions about them.
A. They’ve got, fortunately, very nice oil glands, and they just coat themselves with a sheen of oil and most of the rain just beads right off of their back and rolls off.
Q. Smart bird—or well-built birds.
The corvids—the crows, the ravens. I love these birds, and consider it a treat when a flock of crows come calling or a raven leaves its distinctive tracks in the snow.
I suppose I have to ask the boring question first: Who’s who? How do we tell crow and ravens apart?
A. The raven is a much bigger cousin of the crow. They’re in the same genus [Corvus], and so they are closely related and share a lot of characteristics because of that. But the voice is the easiest characteristic. If you can hear them, the crow is mainly going to caw, and the raven is going to quark, and drip like a faucet and bark like a dog, and make lots of other sorts of noises.
Q. [Laughter.]
A. Being about twice the size, and having about a 4-foot wingspan, the raven really dwarfs the crow when you see them side by side. Its tail is also more shaped like a diamond, and it’s got more of a beard around its throat from its lanceolate feathers there.
Q. I feel like I see crows in numbers, and ravens in onesies and twosies. Is that an incorrect assumption, or a characteristic?
A. That’s quite characteristic. Ravens and crows both mate and form monogamous, lifelong pair bonds, but the raven quickly kicks its kid out of the territory and the pair patrols that territory. [Laughter.] You typically just see the pair.
Q. Is the raven our largest songbird?
A. It’s the largest songbird in the world. Technically it’s a songbird because of complex throat musculature that it has.
Q. It has a syrinx?
A. All birds have a syrinx. It has a junction box there between the two branches of the bronchi that go to the lungs, and it’s where the voice is produced. But the thing that the songbirds have that the others don’t are very complex muscles that wrap around that syrinx so that it can warp and pull and stretch in so many ways to make such a variable amount of noise.
Q. Interesting. The subheading of the book “Gifts of the Crow” reads, “How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans.” A number of times as I was reading the book I was flashing on a National Geographic series from a few years ago called “Monkey Thieves” about the troupes of rhesus macaque monkeys of Jaipur, India, and thinking these corvids remind me of those monkeys! [Laughter.]
In fact in the book you do note several aspects of avian cognition seen in these birds that scientists had thought for a long time only humans and some monkeys possessed–like insight, for instance.
A. Insight has always been one of the hallmarks of primates. The idea here is that you can look at a problem and intuit the solution, basically see the steps that are required to solve this problem. So imagine food hanging from a string, or buried in a tube you cannot reach. You might start thinking, “How can I position that tube, or could I use a tool to get at that food that’s in there?”
Monkeys of course will solve that problem, but crows do as well. Depending on the species, some, like the New Caledonian crow would fashion a tool to get that food out—and they do it almost instantly when they see the problem.
Others might drop things into water to raise the level and float food up to them, or use other sorts of advanced techniques to get at the solution to a problem. [Above, New Caledonian crow making a hooked tool from straight piece of wire.]
Q. Amazing. You also say in the book that they can be observers of body language and the intent of other individuals, or other creatures.
A. We did some experiments here with our American crows that live here in Seattle, and they’re quite tame here. You can typically get quite close to them in the city. But if you lunge at them or even if you just look at them as you approach, they are a completely different bird. They’ll stand away, they’ll move away; they understand that you are paying them some attention and therefore it may be good or it may be bad, but they’re not going to take the risk.
Q. Until the 1960s, you write, birds were regarded as simpletons by scientists, like that expression “birdbrain.” You don’t think birdbrain is a slur, do you? [Above, another video example of birds’ ingenuity in making tools.]
A. It’s a compliment of the highest order, to be sure.
Q. In some of the corvids, their brains are particularly large for their body size.
A. It’s important to understand that it is relative to their body size. The brain of a crow is about the size of your thumb, but the bird only weighs less than a pound. So it’s a large brain relative to its body size. Compare it to something like an ostrich—which is the other extreme for a bird. A very big body, but probably not the brightest bird out there. But crows and ravens, their brains are much more for their body size on line with what we would consider the small monkeys to have. They’re really more like a primate in terms of the amount of brainpower they can bring to a problem.
Q. Mammals and birds both trace back to same reptilian brain—we have a common ancestry, don’t we?
A. That’s the one point we try to make in the book. Some of the things you see and how you interpret them do seem fantastic. But it all comes back to the similarity we have in not only our brains, but the particular nerve cells in our brains—the transmitters that allow us to communicate between nerve cells in the brain and form complex memories. That all goes back to this reptilian heritage that mammals and reptiles and birds all share.
Q. So interesting. Did diet—or does diet—have to do with how developed certain of the corvids’ brains have become? Because they love food, don’t they? [Laughter.]
A. It’s involved, and they’ll do anything to get at food.
It’s almost to flip that around a bit: Because they have a large brain they also have to capture a lot of energy every day. So they have to have a high-quality diet, or at least a lot of whatever they’re eating.
The brain is the most expensive organ in the body for us as well as any other vertebrate. It takes a ton of energy, and when you have a big one, you’re sacrificing the need to do other things instead of getting food. You’re sacrificing that and trading it off with the ability to do things very efficiently with that brain.
Q. We’ve been talking about ravens, and crows, and they have other relatives like the jays. Do they have similar diets, or eat distinctive things?
A. They’re very different. I would say that within the corvids in general, and there are about 140 species there, some are extreme specialists. The pinyon jay, for example, eats primarily pine seeds. It stores pine seeds through to the fall to fuel its economy all winter and spring. Other birds like the raven and generalists, and they’ll eat anything that moves or lies around too long [laughter]—they’re going to eat it.
Some are very flexible in diet, and others are very specialized. The interesting thing is that specialization has driven some parts of the brain of these birds to be incredible—like the pinyon jay I mentioned has to remember where it puts all these seeds. So it has a very large hippocampus, part of its brain that’s responsible for spatial memory.
The raven has got to solve lots of different problems and figure lots of different foods out, so it has a large general forebrain.
Q. You write in “Gifts of the Crow” that everyone always has a crow story, and I suspect when you go to cocktail parties everybody wants to tell you theirs.
A. Yes.
Q. [Laughter.] Rather than tell you that I wanted to ask about another corvid I seem to attract a lot, the blue jay—not an unusual bird in my rural spot. One of my peculiarities among many is that because nature always cleans its plate, I waste nothing—including mice from traps in the cellar or barn or shed. I just put them outside, and by the next morning someone takes it away.
The other day I tossed one out onto the lawn, and went inside, and within minutes something caught my eye, and it was a blue jay that came and stabbed at the mouse and pushed it around at it for a minute, then lifted off and left with it. I didn’t realize they were omnivores or carrion eaters.
A. I would say even the most specialized seed eaters—and the blue jay is toward that line, and specializes in acorns for the most part. But even those that are specialized in the corvids, they’ll always take matter like that. They’ll take a small mouse, a small bird, an egg, a small snake or frog. Again kind of getting back to your first point about the quality of the diet, and that’s high energy, high fat and protein that’s coming in with a small animal like that. That really helps them meet their energetic needs.
Q. Last winter I saw a first with the blue jays again, when they pecked light-colored latex paint off my front porch and would disappear with pieces of paint. And eggshells as well, which I put out for them—within moments, they pick them up and fly away with them. Do they have a crop where they can stash things, or a pouch?
A. The blue jay’s got what we call an expandable throat, which can hold a couple of acorns. When you get into something like the Clark’s nutcracker, they have a special pouch that’s a space under their tongue that opens up like a pelican’s pouch, and they can put 150 or so pine seeds in that thing and fly off with it.
So within the corvids you see these different adaptations to their different ways of life, and again the blue jay is more general—so it hasn’t committed all the way to a throat pouch, but it’s certainly got some elasticity there to help it carry a big load.
Q. The informal verb “rook”–meaning to take money from someone by fooling or cheating them—and it’s also the name for a species of corvid. No coincidence, correct?
A. I think it’s definitely related, yes. [Laughter.]
Q. There’s a chapter in the book called “Delinquency.” [Laughter.] Let’s talk about that a little.
A. The rook is a rather large corvid, sort of halfway between a raven and a crow in size that lives in northern Europe. It’s closely tied to agricultural lands. It probes around for worms, for the most part. But they are very keen on getting food and hiding it, and keeping it hidden from others. They try to deceive others in terms of where they put food for later use. I would guess that they probably stole things that were laying around the farm—not just plants, but shiny things as well. That might have led to that saying.
Q. As I mentioned, there’s a chapter in the book called “Delinquency,” and a wonderful anecdote about windshield wipers, and delinquent crows.
A. It’s not an isolated incident. The interesting thing is that evidently corvids have a little bit of a penchant for windshield wipers all around the world. Out here in the Northern Cascades, I got a call from the National Park Service that was concerned with campers there. They were having their windshield wipers stolen while they were hiking or sleeping, and they were afraid that people would have an accident if they got in their car and didn’t realize their wipers were gone and hit a rainy day like today.
They figured out that it was a raven that was stealing these windshield wipers [laughter], and they had no ideas why, or how many birds were involved. My daughter and I went up there to start catching the ravens and tagging them and seeing who was participating, and maybe figuring out why they were doing this.
Long story short: It was a pair of ravens that lived right around this visitor center that was the culprit, and the folks at the park had already named it Hitchcock, and they were concerned again with the damage it was doing.
We tried to use its big brain to our advantage, and we captured the bird, Hitchcock and its mate. We captured them in a parking lot where cars are vulnerable to having their windshield wipers taken, and we banded the bird right on a windshield.
Q. Oh!
A. That’s an uncomfortable thing for a raven. They’re being held by us. Typically we try to be as calm and keep the birds in the dark as much as possible, but we didn’t this time. We let him look full-on at the windshield the whole time we were putting a band on his leg and measuring him, and tagging him for our scientific use later. And then we let him go. But we hoped that he would form a complex memory of that bad thing—that guy holding me, and looking at a windshield wiper and being in this area—and stop messing with windshield wipers from then on.
And indeed the behavior declined. It doesn’t occur now at all, and those birds are still around. We’ve been able to utilize the birds’ intellect to teach it what’s not acceptable in this setting, and allow the bird to live there and keep other ravens that might pick up the habit from coming in as well.
The other alternative was just to kill the bird and remove it.
Q. And people do that; they get infuriated with birds and destroy them.
A. There are other solutions, and this was an example.
Q. You said the birds are still there. How long do crows and ravens live?
A. The longest on record are somewhere in the 15- or 20-year range, because you have to have a bird banded to follow it, and really know its exact age. If you do the calculations based on their annual rate of mortality, which is very low—less than 5 percent—certainly there are some birds out there that are 20, 30 or maybe even 40 years old out there in the wild.
Q. Wow. With the windshield-wiper kleptomania, you said it’s not just that one incident?
A. It’s been reported in several national parks in the West. It’s been reported in Australia with a different species there. For some reason, these birds really like rubber. Maybe the pliable nature is kind of like an animal skin, and they tug at it—and that’s something that they find possibly leading to food, or that they find interesting or stimulating to touch. We’re not really sure why they do it.
Q. I am always wowed by stories about crows’ ability for facial recognition. Can we talk about Dick Cheney for a minute? [Laughter.]
A. This is funny. It was an experiment we devised, because whenever we study the birds around here, we climb to their nests to band their babies. Or we’d catch them to band or tag them. We always felt that the birds knew us after that; they acted differently. Some were more aggressive; some were more cautious around us after we had watched them awhile.
So we tested that idea directly. The idea we had was to catch a few birds—and the way we catch them is by shooting a net over them. So that’s a scary situation again. When we ran up to get the birds out of the net to band them and tag them, we wore a particular mask.
In our case, the dangerous guy wore a caveman’s face. So the birds as they were having this difficult experience with us, they were looking at a caveman the entire time.
Our idea was then anybody could wear this caveman’s mask later, and walk through where we caught birds. We could see if these birds really respond differently, and it wasn’t just us thinking that. Because anybody could do it.
We also wanted to compare the reaction to us wearing a different mask—and that’s where the Dick Cheney comes in. [Laughter.]
Dick Cheney was the vice president at the time, so his mask was on sale in the internet, and I got a couple. We now walk around campus as Dick Cheney or the caveman, and see if the birds can tell us apart.
Q. And they can, yes?
A. And they can, and they have been for nine years now. So this is an example not just of fine discrimination—to tell those two apart—but also social learning. Birds that are able to tell those masks apart now weren’t even born when the caveman did anything wrong.
They’ve learned from seeing others who were around demonstrate that this guy is bad.
Q. Besides being gifted in these ways we’ve been talking about, crows are inclined to give gifts—you mentioned shiny objects earlier. Have you ever received any yourself?
A. Personally I have never gotten a gift from a crow, probably because I do more scary things to them than pleasant things to them. But I’ve been gifted by learning about these treasures that many people get, and I have seen many of these treasures—and I’ve seen video of the birds holding these things now.
What it looks like are fairly young birds probably, or perhaps birds that don’t have a mate that are courting a human in this case really as a social partner. Maybe a mate, but at least as a social partner.
They give things like trinkets from lockets, or necklaces or keys, or pencil erasers, or shiny rocks and pieces of glass are very common that people get. It happens where either someone’s done a crow a really good deed like free it from a trap, or where they have been feeding them consistently.
Q. I love it. I’m so glad you could join me again to tell us about the gifts of the crow.
(Black-and-white illustrations from “The Gifts of the Crow” are by co-author Tony Angell.)
more from john marzluff
- A Tedx talk (above video)
- On how crows regard their dead and learn from death, from a recent interview in “The New York Times”
- Our previous interview, on “Welcome to Subirdia” (about birds that thrive close to us)
enter to win the book
I’LL BUY A COPY of “Gifts of the Crow” by Dr. John Marzluff for a lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below, all the way at the very bottom of the page after the last reader comment:
What’s your crow (or raven) story? As we said in the interview, everyone seems to have one.
No answer, or feeling shy? Just say, “Count me in,” or something to that effect, and I will, but a reply is even better. I’ll pick a random winner after entries close at midnight Tuesday, July 15, 2025. Good luck to all.
(Disclosure: Purchases from Amazon affiliate links yield a small commission.)
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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 15th year in March 2024. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the July 7, 2025 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
I’m just finishing a book by Jennifer Ackerman, The Brilliance of Birds. This book, and this podcast have both been an enormously interesting , and fun, learning experience. My thanks!
I have loved the Corvids for most of my adult life (I’m 53 now); most of all crows and ravens. I’ve always wanted to make friends with them and got close when I was feeding them peanuts during the pandemic, but never as close as a woman who lived down the street from me. She would stand in her garden and call to them and they would come and accept her offerings of food. I want positive at the time if they were the same crows each time, but thinking on it now I bet they were. They came around when she was puttering around in her garden like they were friends. They remain in my mind some of the smartest birds and I’m consistently fascinated by them. I have read and watched videos about their problem solving capabilities and I’m always just amazed and impressed. I love them so much.
On my honeymoon years ago I had the opportunity to see ravens in person and, having only been around crowd my whole life, was just stunned by their size. Such beautiful animals.
I loved this interview so much. Thank you for sharing it with us here.
Loved this interview. We used to own a small cafe/bakery in western Oregon, with a garden patio area for people to enjoy. One day, we noticed a crow twitch a bad leg was hopping around out there. We started leaving a scrap of food out for her. She would hang out there when her and her crow buddies were around but only she came to the patio. It seemed like they would disappear for long periods but every year, she would come back. We would recognize her by the bad leg and leave her treats. She was the one who started my fascination with crows and ravens. (We always referred to the crow as a “she”, but who can really tell?)
Their cousins, the Steller’s Jay, are my story. While working with Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care and my own Plumas Wildlife Care I rehabbed dozens of birds & mammals. My favorites were/are the corvids. A new baby jay who had fallen out of the nest was brought to me, totally naked, bruised, broken leg and bloody. I didn’t see much hope, but I made it comfortable & warm in a make-shift nest on a heating pad. Low and behold it was still alive the next morning so I thought if this little critter wanted to live I would do my best to help. The rehab process started: splint broken leg with toothpick, apply medication to injured areas, feed with dropper every 2 hours daylight to sunset. I took it with me on trips that took a long time in a protected “nest enclosure” It became stronger and healthier and eventually the ‘cast” was removed and the leg was healed! I let it hop around on my desk to exercise and its favorite thing to do was scatter my paperclips around and pull cards out of my rolodex. Eventually it was big and strong enough to include with the older jays in their outside enclosure and learn how to be a jay. I soon lost track of which jay it was and was satisfied that it wasn’t permanently imprinted on me. They were all successfully released back into the forest setting like they were meant to be.
I love the Steller’s so much that I actually got a tattoo of one on my ankle. Was going to get a “shadow” raven in background but discomfort too much! sorry! The corvids are so smart, so much fun to watch and study. We didn’t get too many crows and the ravens were too smart to need rehab! hahaha
My crow story, which could actually have been a raven, is that one of my friends helped a crow (or raven) when it was still very young. That bird befriended him for life. It would follow him to school and would often be waiting for him when school finished. It would never get too close when the rest of our friend group was there but it would follow us from a safe distance.
I find them to be so smart and don’t understand why many people don’t like them. I feed them all the time and although they are cautious, they seem to be getting used to me. It would be such a privilege to get a present left by them.
Thank you for the interesting article. Sure, I’d love a copy of your book. If you don’t gift me one I will buy it myself. I’ve had a lifelong fondness and respect for Corvids. I recently learned it was possible to “make friends” with crows by offering regular food. I wanted to use something other birds wouldn’t eat. I had a lot of grass fed free range ground beef in the freezer. I put out two patties on the ground first thing in the morning, starting in winter. One large crow with a big chest came, often accompanied by another smaller one. When breeding season came around, I set out another set of patties in mid afternoon. After fledging season, the crow ignored my afternoon patties so I stopped putting those out. I wasn’t sure if the crow learned where the patties came from until one day the crow was waiting in a nearby tree and deliberately made eye contact with me as I set out the patties. It cawed four times. Then it flew across the yard, maintaining eye contact. It would never feed when it could see me, but would caw four times when it saw the patties. I was out walking some time later, and saw that crow (distinctive “chest”) on top of a utility pole, next to a smaller crow. It made eye contact, cawed four times, mantled its wings. I think it was in recognition. :) Looking forward to seeing if we build a relationship as time goes on. :)
Loved the informative interview. I drive a school bus. We empty the bus bucket trash cans into the big trash can once a week. Like clockwork (I witness it and took photos), the Raven lands on the big trash can and tears at the bag on top. When it’s open he or she rifles through it and takes away whatever it chooses. So funny to watch. They are incredibly intelligent.
About a month ago, several adult crows were making a terrible racket in nearby trees and swooping toward my house. There was a young crow at my back door.
I have been raising him ever since, but he still doesn’t fly well- gravity always wins. He also looks like he’s doing “squats” at the gym, as he considers jumping up to a railing, but fails to lift off.
My goal is to release him, his parents still stop by to chat with him, although they stopped feeding him, but until he learns to lift off the ground and can fly higher than his take off spot, he’s vulnerable to local cats etc.
He has free rein all day in the house. I “make” him go up the stairs multiple times each day to increase his awareness that he can go up for safety, and also “force” him to fly throughout the house many times daily in an effort to strengthen his wings and give him flight practice.
What more can I do and when will he show an interest in flying without prodding. Btw, his beak is now completely black all the way to his jaw. It was a reddish orange when we first met.
My Parrots look out the windows and watch the crows. They are fascinated by them. It is interesting to watch my parrots so obviously observing crows – I often wonder if they are envious of the crows freedom.
I tell you my story I been feeding not one or two I feed the neighborhood of crows they been making me broke .I buy bags of peanuts they keep coming I see them fly from every direction as soon as they see me they make all kinds of chips I been feeding them for 4 years at least I live in Florida I never see them get big but when a big crow comes around don’t know if he knows me but the little ones attack him we’ll be scared as they eat as well. Don’t know what this behavior is. . Lately I’ve been attacked by 2 little crows. I don’t know if they have a nest around or something.
But there on one side of the building.
So I have to be careful at the moment. Hopefully, it’ll get over it funny how I feed them. But there’s still act aggressive sometimes.Well I can go on and on talking about the crows.I feed and look out for but I’ll be talking forever.Thank you.Maybe you can give me some feedback
Loved the interview. I raised two baby crows decades ago when their nest was destroyed during tree removal. One of them died, but the other lived and I had to learn “on the fly” how to raise and feed a crow. I learned quite a bit and did everything possible to show the crow how to feed itself in the woods and along the stream. It learned fast. All the while were moments of thievery and silliness as the crow would take whatever it could find and fly off. And when I’d scold it, it’d tell me off right back. Eventually, it began socializing with the neighborhood crows and gradually spent more and more time with them until one day, it was gone. I thought that was it. But, to my surpise, the next day I went outside and there it was. I asked it “Did they kick you out?”. It spent the whole day with me and then the next day, it was gone for good. I’m guessing it came back to say goodbye. But I was happy for it. Very intelligent. very spunky. I loved that little bird. I missed it.
I would like to learn more about birds! Count me in!
A crow that frequents our yard brings my husband, a devoted gardener, pieces of chalk from a neighbors driveway, where children use chalk to draw. Our daughter and her family live in a metropolitan area. A crow in their vicinity drops found lego pieces on their picnic table, where the children often play with their own legos.
Count me IN!!!
One day a group of a dozen crows settled noisily on to my lemon tree. Then they went quiet and stayed there unmoving, for several minutes. I felt it was a visitation. Later I found a small red glass heart under the tree.
I raised up a baby crow a few years ago and he would play with my dogs. The dogs played tug-of-war with a small tree branch and the crow tried playing with them but they were too strong, so I took a smaller stick and taught him to play tug-of-war with me and he would pull and pull while making grunt, growling noises. When I got the stick I would throw it for him and he would fetch it and return to play again. He was very entertaining and extremely smart.
On 1/16/1994 I was reading in my LR & heard a knocking on my roof. I ignored it until I couldn’t. I went upstairs to my roof access – two crows lifted up & started to circle, cawing above my head. Then crows joined them from all directions until I had at least 50 crows circling & a cacophony of cawing above me for about 2 minutes. There was an intense sense of urgency. Then they flew off. I looked up the Native American symbolism of crow/raven which indicated (shapeshifting, survival & communication) This was about 4:30pm. On 1/17/1994 I awakened at about 4:20am, got up for water. Before I got back in bed – we had a 6.7 magnitude earthquake. I understood their message. Ever since, I listen to the crows & ravens.
Thank you for sharing this information, birds are amazing. Count me in please
I am currently following my local group. One bird is handicapped with bent wing and limp. It is well integrated into the groups and sub groups. Not a dominant bird yet not the bottom with the younger birds. It does not appear to be pair bonded. None of the crop of fledgelings are associated with it but I have seen begging for food from it without feeding. The bird is over 5years. I thought I lived in it’s territory but it disappeared for 2 years then returned last year. It mostly resides down. The block but is also seen i. The park 4 blocks away.
We knew a crow who used to tease our friends black lab
Count me in
I have observed various crows swoop down on a restaurant table by the beach and steal the sugar packets, and then take them and put them on the ground and poke them open with their beaks and proceed to eat the sugar. Also other crows have taken the sugar packets and flown away perhaps to open and eat the sugar at a quieter location!
I recently started learning about crows more in depth and can’t wait to learn so much more! Count me in
Yesterday, I found a piece of shiny tinsel on my driveway next to the feeder crows visit. Might it have been a “gift”?
Thanks for the interesting insight into crows.