Crows are a hyper-intelligent species with a complex language and an intergenerational storytelling culture that passes information from one generation to the next; it’s all about survival and who they can trust. I once rescued a crow from a cat, and we became great friends; in fact, it wasn’t just the crow who became my friend, but the entire murder. At the time, I was working on a farm as a woodsman, and the farm cat was a bit of a thug. It was holding down this crow, and when I rescued it, I thought the crow was dead. Separating them, I noticed the crow seemed to be in shock, so, talking softly to it, I took it to my workshop and accommodated it in an old toolbox with straw and some scraps of sheep’s wool left over from shearing. I put out some dog food, water, and milk and shut the door for the night.
In the morning, it sat in the nest I had made, and as I worked on the chairs I was making, it flew up into the rafters, watching everything I did. Satisfied that it was ok I opened the stable top door and went home, leaving it with more food.
The following day it was gone. I was a little sad; I had enjoyed its chatter, and I had talked to it, telling it what I was doing as I made things in the workshop. It was, in its own Crow way, sociable. The next day there were 3 acorns on the workbench which hadn’t been there the night before. I had always left the workshop upper stable door open, and here was something bringing me acorns. The farmer later said a crow had been flying in and out of the workshop. This was astonishing. A crow was bringing me 3 acorns each day; was it the same crow?
As the year moved into winter, coppicing resumed, and I was cutting overstood hazel stools and processing the wood. I would stop for lunch, sit on a log and eat sandwiches and eat sandwiches. That’s when I started to acquire a black-feathered companion who would land near me, take food from my hand, and chatter in low, barely audible tones; sometimes 4 or 5 would come. One day, over 20 arrived and hung out with me in the clearing for several hours, quietly chattering among themselves. I fed them shelled sunflower and pumpkin seeds. I did note that their favorite food was bacon rinds and pieces of cooked sausage. This was over 25 years ago.
I suspect that humans and crows have a long history of co-evolution; we may have cultivated transactional and non-transactional relationships with crows before we moved from living in nature to living under industrial capitalism. Crows and Ravens rank among the most intelligent of birds. “Once disregarded in the world of animal intelligence studies, many crow and raven species are now ranked near primates in terms of cognitive abilities. Wildlife experts John Marzluff and Tony Angell expose crow intelligence in their 2012 book, Gifts of the Crows, writing, “Corvids assume characteristics that were once ascribed only to humans, including self-recognition, insight, revenge, tool use, mental time travel, deceit, murder, language, play, calculated risk-taking, social learning, and traditions. We are different, but by a degree.” Marzluff also led research showing that crows can recognize human faces. https://hraf.yale.edu/the-intelligent-crow-exploring-human-animal-relationships-cross-culturally/
Crow Vocalizations and Language
“Crows – there are perhaps as many as 40 species worldwide, including the American crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos – are highly intelligent. Some not only use tools, but create them out of straw, wood, or wire to access food. They also play. Recent research has shown that they employ analogical reasoning and recognize faces of individual people. They have a complex social structure and their nuanced communications reflect that”
Crow Human Communication
Many people describe situations where they feel they have experienced “conversations” with crows, meaning a back-and-forth exchange of sounds. Do you think crows notice when we vocalize at them and attempt to vocalize back?
If a person and a crow regularly interact (usually because the person reliably feeds the crows), then it’s fairly common for ritualistic behavior to develop, especially if the behavior is rewarded with food. https://corvidresearch.blog/2019/03/14/crow-vocalizations-part-ii-qa/
Crow Toolmakers
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when social traditions accumulate improvements over time. In humans cumulative cultural evolution is thought to depend on a unique suite of cognitive abilities, including teaching, language and imitation. Tool-making New Caledonian crows show some hallmarks of cumulative culture; but this claim is contentious, in part because these birds do not appear to imitate. One alternative hypothesis is that crows’ tool designs could be culturally transmitted through a process of mental template matching. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-27405-1?error=cookies_not_supported&code=12764609-3f04-4535-9107-8e7c92092c61
The ‘crafting’ of tools involves (i) selection of appropriate raw material, (ii) preparatory trimming and (iii) fine, three-dimensional sculpting. Its evolution is technologically important because it allows the open-ended development of tools. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1809970/
My Experiences of Crow-Human Communications
When I say nature is my natural home, It’s where I feel most comfortable. Since the interaction with the crow on the farm, I have continued to have interactions with crows, including observing the death of a Crow and what appeared to be the “paying of respects to the dead and a wake”. I am of the opinion that crows have a complex culture on a par with humans and primates, and the science seems to support that idea. Crows are regarded as magical birds and guardians of the underworld; people are superstitious of them and, without understanding them, have been known to get into difficulties with them. They can be vindictive toward those people who disrespect them, and it may be very difficult to make amends, because once you have upset one crow, they tell their mates and their offspring. The rule of thumb is probably: unless you want a lifetime of trouble, leave them be.
Building relationships with animals in nature and in the urban environment is deeply rewarding. I have non-transactional friendships with most of the urban foxes in my locality. Non-transactional means that they don’t associate me with food, but when I talk to the foxes, it’s always in a soft, sing-songy voice, greeting them, “Hello, foxy, how are you? And I am rewarded with a moment of eye contact, head cocked to one side and then the other.
The Birds are the Alarm Call in the Forest, But This Communication Is Also More Complex Than That
The birds can tell us who is in the woods, where they are, and whether you are in danger. Birdsong is the background chatter during the day, with occasional alarm calls, or the song ceases and the forest falls silent. If the birds know you well in an environment you visit regularly, when you enter, there will be no change in the chatter. When the birds fall silent, it can indicate imminent danger. Sometimes you can enter a wood, and there is no birdsong at all; often that’s an indicator that you shouldn’t be there. Before I knew better, I entered a wood where the birds were not singing; it was silent, eerie. I am glad ~I was with a friend because we discovered a human body, and it hadn’t died naturally. I remember mentioning in my statement to the Police that the forest felt somehow wrong, and the detective interviewing me said he had heard people say that before. It was a lesson to listen to nature.
I was filming and recording birdsong a couple of years ago in some semi-urban woods. The place was alive with sound, and I was getting the most amazing recording; suddenly, it ceased. I packed up my camera and recording equipment and made ready to leave as I zipped my pack shut. A man in his 30s or 40s, with a dog, walked through the clearing; he didn’t approach me, he acknowledged me, and kept walking. As he passed me, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and I started to experience a state of primal fear. I left the area quickly. The last time I had experienced that sensation was while working in psychiatric healthcare in the presence of a diagnosed psychopath. It’s the presence of a human predator that induces fear like that (never ignore those instinctual cues).
People who reject spending long periods in nature, especially those who profess themselves to be shamans and ceremonialists and constantly talk about the function of their own brains, deprive those who follow them of the richness of what lessons nature and wild animals have to offer. Especially the neuroscience of the connection to nature and its positive effect on mood.
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