Crows deserve more respect

While out for a walk recently, I took this photo of a murder of crows flying off together from the treetops. I’ve often watched crows do this without giving it much thought, but on that day it sparked my curiosity. Why do they gather? Where are they going? Professor Google provides an answer to the second question: Still Creek, Burnaby, to roost for the night.

Hitchcock’s The Birds was the first horror movie I ever watched. In one scene, a large flock of crows attacks a group of children as they leave school. As a 13-year-old, I found this terrifying. I re-watched the movie recently, and found that scene preposterous and laughably fake.

As some sources suggest, that movie may be one reason why crows have a dubious reputation. Yes, they do indeed attack people, though not in such large numbers as in the movie. And they usually have good reasons for doing so.

They’re actually quite fascinating, and not only because they’re brave enough to attack us larger creatures. For example, crows:

• mate for life and are highly social
• eat just about anything, including garbage or roadkill, which might seem disgusting but certainly demonstrates a remarkable ability to adapt to urban settings
• remember/recognize human faces and can somehow convey that information to other crows; if you harm one, they spread the word, and a crow who isn’t even the injured party might retaliate
• will recruit other crows to help attack anyone who threatens their young/nests
• can use tools, like one innovator who jammed the tip of a piece of wire into a crevice, then walked in a circle to bend the wire into a hook that it used “to extract a treat from the bottom of a tube” (In the company of crows, Canadian Geographic)

Canuck the Crow, a local human-raised Northwestern crow who disappeared in 2019, was once voted Vancouver’s unofficial ambassador (beating out Ryan Reynolds and Seth Rogen). His most notorious exploit? Flying off with a knife from a crime scene. Perhaps it would have incriminated him in the offence.

Crows often protest loudly in and around the stand of evergreens outside our apartment building (video below).

This group might have been harassing owls, who are known to attack and kill lone crows, given the chance.

Their most frequent target around here are bald eagles, a threat to the crows’ young. Crows will repeatedly dive bomb a lone eagle to chase it off (as in the video below).

A crow once pooped on me in a playground. Sitting with a friend on a bench under a tree, I felt something wet splatter onto my head. The bench faced the waterplay where our children were playing, so fortunately I could rinse most of the goop out of my hair.

I don’t blame that crow. Maybe our chatter woke it from a mid-day siesta after a grueling morning spent hunting for McDonald’s fries or collecting shiny gifts for crow friends like Gabi (The girl who gets gifts from birds). That well-aimed poop was effective: we immediately shut up and cleared the bench!

Next time you spot a crow, stop and watch for a while (not from directly below it, though).

Crow by Travis, Flock V-Formation by Kelsey Chisamore, and Crow by Zoran Djordjijevic from Noun Project