Are Crows Really Our Friends?

When my household and I visited my sister Annie in California final summer time, I used to be excited to see her new home—however extra excited to satisfy a neighbor she’d instructed me lots about. Regardless of being a frequent customer, the neighbor didn’t make an look at first; perhaps he was spooked by my clamorous children. A few days later, although, I got here face-to-beak with Sal in a slender aspect yard. Trying above the succulents and wildflowers, Sal met my gaze with an air of appraisal so frank that, coming from an individual, it will have been impolite. Then the shiny black American Crow flew away.

Annie first met Sal in early 2024, quickly after she and her companion, Jack, moved into their home. She was eradicating outdated landscaping material when a crow landed on the fence and checked out her curiously. She pointed to the place the lifted tarp had uncovered contemporary soil and was intrigued when the fowl swooped down and grabbed a worm. “It appeared like Sal understood,” she says.

American Crows all look roughly an identical to the human eye. However Annie and Jack got here to acknowledge Sal, a daring character with a particular hop on account of a nasty leg, and started providing the fowl unsalted peanuts. The treats attracted a second, extra timid crow, whose deformed foot additionally distinguished it. They known as Sal’s buddy Pal. Inside just a few weeks, Annie and Jack have been shopping for peanuts in bulk. Utilizing meals as a reward, they educated the 2 corvids to pay them common visits.

Or did they? Annie puzzled whether or not, from the crows’ perspective, it is perhaps the opposite means round.

In spite of everything, the people have been additionally rewarded. When Annie opened the curtains within the morning, she appeared ahead to seeing the crows swoop all the way down to land on her fence, seemingly greeting her. When she got here exterior, they may say hey with a swoosh of their wings or perch on a patio chair reverse her as she labored on her laptop computer. The best way Sal and Pal had come to belief her was gratifying, and she or he felt much more honored by their consideration when she realized that the crows had full social calendars; it turned out one neighbor knew Sal as Russell. “Clearly they’ve a lot else occurring,” Annie says. “It felt like they’d these busy lives that we have been becoming into.”

On the subject of corvid–human connections, Annie isn’t the one one who wonders who’s coaching whom. Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist on the College of Washington, has developed bonds with many crows at his dwelling and on campus. Such a relationship, he says, “completely alters my conduct.” If, as an illustration, he forgets to carry peanuts for the birds at his college, he takes an alternate route round college. “I’ll discover myself sneaking throughout campus in a tunnel or via buildings,” he says, “as a result of I really feel so unhealthy after I run into them.”

Like Bergstrom and my sister, many individuals kind sustained private connections with their native crows. Those that do typically think about the eye of those charismatic corvids a privilege and a supply of pleasure. Some even name the animals their pals. What’s tougher to find out, although, is whether or not the crows return the sensation.

At probably the most fundamental degree, crows probably view people who feed them as a way of survival. Our yards might present a protected place  to congregate and forage. A Crimson-tailed Hawk that may strike in an open area could also be extra reluctant to swoop onto a small garden. When individuals put out treats, it solely sweetens the deal.

Generally crows will seemingly go away “items” for individuals who feed them, which recipients typically view as a thank-you. However these choices—keys, cash, stones, and, in Bergstrom’s case, probably a hoop his daughter had misplaced—might have a less complicated rationalization. Anne B. Clark, a retired Binghamton College behavioral ecologist who studied city crows, says that in all movies she’s seen of this conduct, the birds have been very younger. Juveniles ceaselessly carry and play with fascinating objects, she says. So a crow might merely be dropping what’s already in its beak to select up meals. “My very own opinion is that crows usually are not terribly occupied with us,” Clark says.

Nonetheless, inadvertent actions might grow to be strategic. The crows, ravens, and rooks within the genus Corvus are among the many world’s most clever animals. Some can style instruments or function difficult units to get meals. If a crow notices that it’s rewarded when leaving objects for individuals, it’d proceed to take action. “It’s not a heavy elevate for a sensible animal,” says corvid biologist John Marzluff, a professor emeritus on the College of Washington.

But many individuals who obtain consideration from crows really feel that the birds have extra complicated motives. “It appeared like they’d simply come by to hang around,” my sister tells me—like, effectively, pals.

What’s a pal, anyway? For a scholarly perspective, I spoke to Thom van Dooren, a area thinker on the College of Sydney and creator of The Wake of Crows, a 2019 guide in regards to the entangled lives of people and these corvids. He believes crows relate to individuals in ways in which meet a number of situations for friendship.

Criterion one: You will need to know a pal from a stranger. “With the intention to strike up a friendship, it’s important to be the sorts of organisms who can firstly acknowledge each other as people,” he says. Right here, the avians have a bonus. Whereas individuals wrestle to inform crows aside, crows are startlingly good at figuring out us. It is smart. Crows dwell a very long time—Clark has identified people as outdated as 19—and it pays for them to recall their enemies and allies.

In experiments, city crows held lengthy grudges in opposition to individuals who mistreated them, cawing harshly and forming mobs upon seeing the face of their persecutor—even years later. My sister’s crow companions knew her when she had a distinct haircut or wore a hat or sun shades. Crows acknowledged Bergstrom in a brand new jacket with the hood up. Strolling round completely different elements of city, he typically encounters a crow who appears to know him; a fowl will land close by and have a look at him expectantly. When he returned to campus after a 12 months away, crows greeted him instantly, Bergstrom says: “Kind of, ‘The place the hell have you ever been?’”

However noticing a well-known face in a crowd doesn’t make a friendship. You might want to share experiences, too. Amongst their type, many crows kind extended household relationships; juveniles typically keep dwelling for just a few years to assist mother and father look after younger siblings. They flip their social consciousness to us, too. The best way crows not solely acknowledge people but additionally take note of our gaze—assembly our eyes, following the place we glance—suggests van Dooren’s subsequent criterion: intersubjective engagement, or two acutely aware minds assembly one another and sharing a actuality.

What’s extra, a friendship can’t be strictly utilitarian, van Dooren says. Crows who get to know people should be after greater than peanuts and safety. “I believe there’s all kinds of fascinating motivations for these behaviors which can be about curiosity, exploration—simply main an fascinating life,” he says. (Maintaining entertained is, after all, its personal sort of utility.)

Just a few years in the past, considered one of Marzluff’s graduate college students educated birds to carry out a activity impressed by Aesop’s fable “The Crow and the Pitcher.” 4 of 16 crows realized to drop stones in a tube of water to get a cheese puff. Later, when viewing the equipment whereas in a mind scanner, the profitable birds had completely different neural exercise patterns than their much less competent friends. Like a skier on a mountaintop visualizing a subsequent run, “they have been principally reliving that have,” Marzluff says. In different phrases, the crows have been telling themselves a sort of story. This implies yet one more requirement for friendship, van Dooren says. You might want to be “in a position to make sense of your life as a story,” he says, earlier than you may get to know its recurring characters.

We won’t ever know what crows are considering, however as storytelling creatures ourselves, we’re primed to see crows as gamers in our lives—every friendship a story carried out on a small stage, perhaps in a park or throughout a picnic desk. But the saga of humanity’s relationship with corvids has taken place on a bigger scale, throughout millennia. Of their guide In the Company of Crows and Ravens, Marzluff and his coauthor Tony Angell argue that these birds and people have skilled “cultural coevolution.” In prehistoric occasions, ravens and crows started to hold round locations the place individuals hunted or fished and scavenged a few of our haul. Because the corvids turned our companions and opponents, we developed customs to drive them away. We hunted them, chased them, erected scarecrows. Our habits formed each other’s.

The ever-present birds additionally influenced mythologies world wide. The raven, typically portrayed as a shape-shifter or trickster, is a vital determine for Indigenous peoples in North America. In a legend of the Haida, for instance, Raven discovers the primary people hiding inside a clamshell. In the meantime, historical Greeks related crows with the god Apollo and named a constellation Corvus. (Don’t squint too exhausting searching for a fowl within the night time sky; the celebs kind what seems to be like a rhombus.)

Corvids seem in additional trendy lore, too, from Poe to Hitchcock. However now that fewer individuals farm, hunt, or in any other case concern themselves with the scavengers, the birds in all probability aren’t molding our tradition as strongly as they as soon as did. But we’re nonetheless shaping theirs, Marzluff says.

As we’ve moved to city areas, crows adopted, and like coyotes, they’ve discovered that metropolis dwellers are much less more likely to lure or shoot them. Ever savvy, crows have realized new habits, resembling nesting on utility poles, and as with many varieties of city wildlife, they appear to be rising much less cautious round us. Such modifications could also be cultural, with birds passing down data over generations. Behavioral shifts may additionally grow to be baked into their DNA if birds with an inborn curiosity in, say, consuming fries or nesting on a high-rise usually tend to survive to breed.

Over millennia of following us into new habitats, crows additionally realized that we’re a fickle species. People present meals, however typically we harass or kill them. Our settlements could be alternately lethal or sheltering. To “keep away from hazard and benefit from riches,” Marzluff says, “they’ll’t not be occupied with individuals.” In order that they’ve advanced to look at intently what people do. And their eager consideration could also be key to a friendship that’s singular.

Whereas different wild animals develop relationships with people, many are much less intelligent than crows or ravens, which have a brain-to-body ratio on par with a small monkey. Different extremely smart animals, resembling elephants or whales, don’t have the identical coevolutionary historical past with Homo sapiens. And whereas a raven or magpie typically befriends an individual, Marzluff says that by far probably the most corvid–human relationships occur with crows. It helps that the birds are ubiquitous within the Northern Hemisphere. Crows are all over the place we’re, maintaining a tally of us.

Even when people have a friendship—or one thing that feels prefer it—with a crow, the connection occurs on the wild animal’s phrases. They go to after they need to, and so they might disappear from our life abruptly. Take Tatterwing, Bergstrom’s favourite crow, whose lacking feathers made her wings resemble Swiss cheese. (Tatterwing typically made a rattle-knock name that’s extra frequent to females.) At some point, she merely vanished. Bergstrom guesses she molted and grew new feathers, and with out her tatters, he not knew her. Later, he noticed a fowl round his dwelling who behaved like Tatterwing however he couldn’t make sure it was her.

Pal and Sal left, too. At some point final September, my sister seen Pal act unusually. The fowl lay down in an uncommon spot, as if hiding. After that, neither crow visited her once more, and a brand new pair appeared. She suspects her pals have been ousted from their territory; a month later, Sal was noticed at a neighbor’s dwelling a block away. “I miss them,” Annie tells me. She and Jack have left peanuts for the brand new crows, however up to now the birds haven’t visited persistently.

Crows, after all, have lives solely other than ours. That turns into even clearer to me after I meet up with Craig Gibson, an novice naturalist and photographer devoted to observing the birds in Lawrence, Massachusetts. About 25 miles north of Boston because the you-know-what flies, this industrial metropolis is dwelling to considered one of New England’s largest winter crow roosts. Whereas crows are typically territorial in the course of the breeding season, within the colder months they arrive collectively and forage in flocks. At night time, as much as 15,000 birds might crowd collectively right here in Lawrence, shoulder to shoulder, as they sleep.

I arrive round 4 p.m., simply earlier than sundown in December. The day is chilly and thickly overcast, however the crows know the time. Gibson and I look via barbed wire towards a brick constructing complicated the place American Crows and a few Fish Crows collect on rooftops, wires, and asphalt—wherever they’ll match. Shortly after sundown, they’ll transfer from their staging areas to branches of river birches and silver maples lining the Merrimack River. 

I haven’t succeeded at making a crow pal in my yard close to Boston, however in Lawrence, I’m content material to be an onlooker. I swivel my head as rivers of birds stream towards us. They fly purposefully, dense overhead, and descend with playful dives and barrel rolls I’ve by no means seen earlier than. The cawing is fixed and raucous.

Gibson doesn’t have relationships with any of those particular birds. He’s spent virtually 500 nights contemplating them as a bunch, wild and nameless. “They’re placing on present for you!” he shouts. Actually, although, these birds aren’t taking note of us; they’re performing for each other. We’ll proceed to inform tales about corvids, however on this second, their story is their very own.

This story initially ran within the Summer season 2026 challenge. To obtain our print journal, grow to be a member by making a donation today.