The Urban Bestiary

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  Baby Crows in Our Midst

  “Why do I never see baby crows?” is a common crow question. In truth, it is likely that we have all seen plenty of baby crows, but we are misled by the human tendency to conflate baby-ness with smallness. A few crows will jump from the nest before they are grown and when they cannot yet fly. Such precocious chicks are quickly hidden beneath shrubbery by their parents, and we seldom see them, though occasionally we might run across one of these fat, round, wide-eyed little fluff balls. Normally, though, when a baby crow leaves the nest, it is about the same size as its adult parent, and fully feathered; in the peak of baby-crow season—late spring to early summer—they will be everywhere. Physically, baby crows can be recognized by their bills, which may have a fleshy grayish-pink gape left at the base; their feathers, which are a duller matte brown-black, rather than the iridescent purple-black of the adult crow; their eyes, which are typically gray-blue rather than the dark amber of adults’; and perhaps their tails, which may be slightly stubby. Occasionally there will be a bit of downy fluff left above the eyes.

  But the best way to tell a baby crow is by its behavior. Baby crows are not dumb; they possess all the native intelligence of their species. But they are naive. They sit quietly, looking slowly all around. They are approachable and believe that just about anything—a bicycle, a giant cat with a bell around its neck, a raccoon, an SUV, you or me—is a strange, wondrous, and probably even friendly thing. They have hesitant takeoffs and rather bad landings. They look sweet. They are loud, begging for food from their parents with an annoying waaaaaaaahhh call. If you see a crow, and you instinctively think of it as a baby, you’re probably right. Watch for them—they are all around us, a pleasure to observe.

  An aside: Ornithologists and even hard-core birders do not call young crows babies. “Humans have babies, birds have young,” we are told. True, true, but I believe it is a harmless colloquialism, and it comes so naturally to our tongues, an example of the easy empathy that is one of our own species’ loveliest qualities. Still, if you want to be orno-hip, you can call these babies hatch-year birds through the fall, after which it becomes harder to identify them. By autumn, most young of the year will have grown their first adult flight feathers—their wings and tails will be shiny and new, but their backs and heads will still be a dull matte brown.

  When crow intelligence is described, it is most often measured against human intelligence or, more generally, primate intelligence. Crows are “as smart as some lower primates” or “approach the intelligence of some higher primates” or demonstrate certain behaviors and ways of knowing that are “amazingly” or “uncannily” or “disturbingly” like our own. These three words come up frequently. Uncannily and amazingly, I suppose, because we have so long believed that we primates possess the only real intelligence. Disturbingly, I imagine, because we prefer that this be so. We have been willing to grant the higher intelligence of remote creatures, such as dolphins in the depths of the oceans or safely exotic elephant tribes. But crows? Dirty, loud, ultra-common birds we see every day, watching our every move and shitting on our SUVs?

  Animal behaviorists at Cambridge University evaluated a vast collection of scientific papers and research on crows and other corvids with an eye to cognitive processes, and they reported their findings in Science. They concluded that crows share the same “cognitive toolbox” as humans and other primates. Living in close social groups and striving within these groups to find food and secure bodily safety in the face of similar social and ecological challenges have led us all—crow, primate, human—to develop the same complex cognitive pathways, including causal reasoning (as in the development and use of tools); flexibility (the ability to generate rules from past experiences that provide a varied repertoire of potential responses to novel stimuli, as opposed to rote learning); imagination (where situations and scenarios not presently experienced can still be conceptualized in the mind’s eye); and prospection (the ability to imagine future events).

  A Murder of Crows versus Crow Murder

  No one knows for certain why a group of crows is referred to as a murder; the term has been around since the fifteenth century, and its origin in this context is a mystery, lost in time. The Oxford English Dictionary speculates that it may have to do with the bird’s cultural association with death, or perhaps its “harsh and raucous cry.” It is unlikely to stem from a notion of crows themselves as murderers, though there are thousands of anecdotal reports of violent skirmishes between crows, some of them resulting in death. I have never seen a crow murder, but I have observed some vicious attacks. Crows are highly social and live in extended family groups, where there are bound to be occasional skirmishes. Intragroup disagreements are typically solved with symbolic posturing and vocalizing, or a few pecks. But if there is a territorial interloper from outside a crow’s social group or a crow seeking access to another crow’s mate, then the fights can be more brutal. And like many other birds, crows will attack and sometimes kill a bird with aberrant coloring or one that is sick or injured. This may be to keep the standout or vulnerable bird from drawing the attention of predators, which would put the other crows at risk. In the case of injured crows, though, I rarely see them attacked; it is far more common, in my experience, to observe crows standing guard over an injured family member, attempting a measure of care.

  Prospection in particular marks advanced mental acuity. Envisioning the future allows us (both crows and humans) to play out various scenarios, weigh consequences, avoid dangerous or unproductive actions, and take calculated risks. It is key in the practice of deception. There is a crow nest in the big hawthorn tree in front of my house. One spring day, while the nest was in progress, I saw a crow fly toward it carrying a large twig. When she spotted me standing there on the sidewalk, she landed on the electrical wire over my head, regarded me sidelong for a few seconds, then flew purposefully away with her stick, not to her nest, but to an abandoned crow nest across the street, where she actually pretended to go to work, nestling her stick among the others. I quickly scampered inside and up to the blind provided by my study window. With binoculars, I saw the crow emerge from the tree and sit again on the electrical wire, scanning the block, presumably looking for me. Satisfied, she flew to her real nest, but not before retrieving her fresh twig from the sham nest! Such deception at the nest is common among crows and is far more complicated than rote forms of avian distraction, such as the killdeer’s famous broken-wing predator-distraction display (where an adult killdeer flops on the ground as if injured when a potential threat nears her ground-scrape nest).

  Neurobiological studies round out the picture of crow intelligence. We know by simple weight and measurement that corvid brains are relatively large—given the size of the birds, their brains are bigger than we would expect (as a percentage of body mass, some corvid brains are even larger than ours), and this is one indicator of mental potential. Yet new research shows that it is not just the size of the crow brain but its structure that accounts for the birds’ storied intelligence. It’s not just any old part of the brain that is enlarged in crows, it’s the forebrain in particular—the segment having to do with behavioral responses to sensory stimuli, problem-solving, causal reasoning, and the integration of memory with sensory and motor signals, and even emotion. This means that while crows do react to the world by instinct or by what they’ve learned through mimicking other crows or by rote (as do most vertebrate animals), they also respond through imagination and experiment and experience and whim. Novel situations may invite play, engagement, or perhaps a seemingly studied disinterest. More than most birds, crows make up their lives; they do new things, nutty things, really, really smart things all the time, and if we watch, we will be privileged to observe them.

  It is wonderful that we have come to a time when we are beginning to speak openly in stringent scientific circles about the rich consciousness of a bird, something that was nearly unheard of in the last century. With this realization, we enter into an em
pathy and intimacy that is as instructive as it is instinctive (to recognize the consciousness of animals comes naturally—it is often unlearned in our formal education, and then relearned in our experience of the world). But acknowledging the ways that avian intelligence can be like ours is just a start. I believe that crows are asking something even more of us. For so long we have mistaken human intelligence for all intelligence, limiting our understanding of the wild, of nonhumans, and of ourselves. The next step in the evolution of our own natural intelligence might be for us—as individuals, naturalists, scientists, just folks going along our day with creatures of all kinds in our path—to allow the depth of animal minds and cognition to exist apart from a human yardstick, to recognize a plethora of intelligences that possess richness and value apart from how much or how little they resemble our own.

  Dive-Bombing Crows

  Dive-bombing of humans by crows is a seasonal occurrence, linked to the most vulnerable stages of crow nesting. Even if we don’t actually see the young, the adult birds in spring and summer may be protecting a nest with eggs, a hidden nest with freshly hatched chicks, or chicks that have left the nest and are tucked away in the branches or shrubbery. In a couple of months, when the young are grown and self-sufficient, the dive-bombing will stop.

  Being so large and loud and bulky, crows are at a disadvantage as nesters. Think about it: Most of the urban tree-nesting songbirds are so small. Robins, chickadees, sparrows, finches—they can build sweet little nests tucked into shadowy corners, well camouflaged and difficult to find. Their young are small too, and easy to hide. Crows have no such luck. They are stealthy for their size, but it’s hard to hide a big nest full of baby crows, all of them cawing in that baby-crow way, sounding like ducks. As large, unpredictable mammals, we are rightly perceived as a threat.

  Here’s what to do about dive-bombing crows: If a crow is cawing at you during nesting season, just cross nonchalantly to the other side of the street, ignoring it completely, as if that’s what you meant to do anyway. Continue on your way, enjoying the day. If you are dive-bombed anyway, just keep going—the farther away you get, the better. Think kind thoughts for the well-being of the crow young. (Why not? Crows are sometimes good at perceiving intent, so cultivating a benevolent attitude might help you seem less threatening.) If a crow has already determined, fairly or not, that you are a threat and is dive-bombing you on sight (not ideal—other crows will think that this crow has a good reason to hate you and might join the fun), then avoid the area for a while. If that’s impossible, walk through the area waving your arms slowly over your head, or, since we know that crows recognize human faces, consider a disguise—for real! A wide-brimmed hat that hides your hair and face, some sunglasses…

  Crows attacking hawks and owls is another common occurrence, and that happens year-round. Many hawks and owls prey on both adult crows and their young, so crows are proactive about discouraging these birds’ presence. It’s amazing to watch a few small crows attacking a huge hawk or eagle. The crows that seem so large on our city sidewalks suddenly become tiny next to a bald eagle.

  I’m not a crow apologist, but I do think it helps to consider matters from the complicated standpoint of an urban-nesting crow parent. And I think it’s delightful that, no matter how urban our lives, we can witness firsthand the circle of life from our home places.

  What is flight intelligence? Flock intelligence? What is learned when there is a breeze in your feathers, when your voice is shaped by a syrinx, when you can see the ultraviolet spectrum glow upon the wing of another bird?

  Darwin was able to hold this duality lightly. Though the science of which he is the supposed father has dismissed the anthropomorphizing of animals as sentimental and inappropriate, if Darwin recognized an expression or emotion in an animal, he never hesitated to call it by the name that made sense. Whereas modern scientific journals would never use such language, Darwin freely referred to animals as happy, peaceful, distressed, or displaying any other emotion that seemed to make common sense. For him, continuity in human and animal consciousness was a given, one so basic to his understanding of evolutionary continuity (why should it be morphological only, with consciousness suddenly sprouting in the human animal?—this made no sense whatever) that he took it as a baseline given, one he never even sought to defend. But Darwin did not see animal minds as little, more limited human minds. We all know the famous depictions of Darwin’s Tree of Life, with multifarious branches leading from the insects to the fish and reptiles, up to the birds, the squirrels and skunks, the giraffes, the small primates, the great primates, and perching at the top of the tree, in a final, gloriously intelligent (if slightly precarious) leaf: us. But this was never Darwin’s vision. Darwin’s tree was really more of a shrub—a Shrub of Life, where all the tiny branches tangle together, not strictly stratified. We spring from a root intelligence that develops uniquely and in the span of evolutionary time, in the manner fit for each species. Thus crow intelligence is crow intelligence (residing alongside coyote intelligence, chicken intelligence, butterfly intelligence, the strange knowing of trees that exists without even a brain), not an inferior form or approximation of human intelligence.

  Story is an entrance to this middle way. In storytelling we recognize human-animal similarity and allow the mystery of uniqueness at the same time. And there is no better guide into the world of wild story than the ever-present crow. Everyone has a crow story. If you find yourself seated at a boring dinner with conversation flagging, just bring up crows—“The other day I saw a crow do the craziest thing”—and the party will leap to life, with guests proclaiming that they have seen crows chase falling leaves, play in the snow, climb a ladder for fun, pester the cat by imitating her meow, practice aerodynamic maneuvers in the wind, follow the mail carrier, befriend the kitten, steal from the squirrel, daintily eat french fries out of the trash can as if dining on haute cuisine.

  These stories come alive for us in the noticing and gain something more in the telling. In story, we feel less compelled to impose ourselves, our interpretations, our beliefs than we do in other ways of information-sharing. (Beatrix Potter teaches this well: the ill-fitting human clothes worn by her animals keep falling off.) We report what we objectively see, more or less, and yet nearly all crow stories end, eyes wide, with the same questions: What was that bird doing? What was it thinking? We pause. It is this lovely, restive uncertainty that makes the story wonderful.

  In the Coast Salish mythology from my own corner of the world, there is a famous tale in which a crow or raven returns light to a darkened world:

  Grandfather kept the sun hidden in a cedar box, and Crow—desiring the sunlight and being the consummate trickster shape-shifter—found a way to seduce Grandfather’s daughter, journey into her as a seed, and become born as a beloved grandson. Unable to deny the boy anything, Grandfather one day gave in to his grandson’s begging and let him play with the secret sun box. When he did, the boy shifted back into Crow form and flew through the smoke hole in the ceiling, spreading light across the world.

  There are many other tales of crows and ravens and light retrieval among First Peoples in North America, but I was thrilled to find a similar myth far across the globe, among the Ainu stories of northern Japan:

  In the early days, a scaled monster fed his incessant hunger by swallowing the sun. The earth grew shadowy, and the people were cold, afraid, and hungry as their crops began to fail in the darkness. Only a crow named Pashkuru Kamui had the audacity to fly at the monster. Pashkuru Kamui pecked the monster’s forked tongue until the beast panicked and regurgitated his prey, the sun. Light and warmth returned to the earth and the people.

  It is no longer “the early days,” but we are inhabiting this myth now, in our way, as crows guide humans toward a new kind of light. Our crow stories bring the fullness of another animal’s intelligence into our sphere—that which we see, that which we know, that which we recognize, that which science proclaims, and that which we can never know. In a
llowing this fullness, we allow our own intelligence to come to life—wild, rangy, riverine, sunlit.