I read a recent story about how crows teach each other who the bad people are – I guess if she has 50 crow friends, they must do the same with nice people. (perhaps they have learned hobo markings)
As much as I really hate crows, they never cease to amaze me with their capabilities. They’re ugly, and have one of the most obnoxious calls, and they poop everywhere, and they knock out my power electrocuting themselves on the transformer about a dozen times a year. But they’re also really smart, they’re loyal, they have an interesting and complex set of social interactions, and they have inter-species diplomacy.
We didn’t have a lot around us where I grew up… Out here in los Angeles there are a surprising number of them. In Valencia (30 miles north of LA) there are occasionally flocks of hundreds - they remind me of the clouds of starlings that I would see when driving through the Midwest. It can be intimidating coming out of the office late at night and seeing them in every tree and lining the top edge of the surrounding buildings.
My affinity for crows grew out of the stories I heard as a kid about pet ones. Also, I was always told that I must have a few crow genes in my DNA because of my ability to immediately find small shiny objects when lost.
“There’s definitely a two-way communication going on there,” said John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington. “They understand each other’s signals.”
Marzluff and a colleague, Mark Miller, have studied crows and the humans who feed them, and they found the two species can form personal relationships.
“If you want to form a bond with a crow, be consistent in rewarding them,” he said, recommending shelled peanuts because they’re a high-energy food that makes noise when it hits the ground.
She often photographs the crows and other birds, and she lost her lens cap in a nearby alley a few weeks ago while photographing a bald eagle.
When she returned home, the lens cap was sitting on the edge of the birdbath.
Mann checked video from the surveillance camera she set up to record the birds and spotted a crow bringing the lens cap into the yard, walking it to the birdbath, and then rinsing it off.
“I’m sure that it was intentional,” she said. “They watch us all the time. I’m sure they knew I dropped it. I’m sure they decided they wanted to return it.”
