Crow behavior

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, September 2012; written by Lisa Pearson.

If you’ve lived in Alaska for even a short time, you probably have your own ‘clever raven’ anecdote. Anthropomorphic noises, playful behavior and an uncanny ability to ferret out garbage give ravens – and their smaller crow cousins – a real personality. In their new book “Gifts of the crow: how perception, emotion and thought allow smart birds to behave like humans”, John Marzluff and Tony Angell entertain and educate readers with examples of corvid problem solving, socialization and skill.

Marzluff is a professor of Wildlife Science at the University of Washington, and a lot of the material in this book covers his experiments and observations relating to corvid behavior, but he also includes stories that have been told to him by other people. Angell does a wonderful job throughout the book reproducing these behaviors and human-corvid encounters with pen and ink illustrations. One of the examples he includes of raven “delinquency” is from Juneau: a raven carefully tipping down his gullet the last drops from a discarded Raven’s Brew coffee cup. (I checked the notes in the back of the book, thinking this story was farfetched, but the authors saw actual photographic evidence from a Juneau resident.)

Another impressive trait in the corvid is its powers of observation. In some cases, this might enable a raven to watch and learn a skill that another raven already knows. I have actually seen this myself. One clever raven in the neighborhood had discovered that the snap-lock handles securing my parents’ garbage can lid could be unlocked if the raven jumped up and down on the handle long enough. Other ravens watched, and soon there were 2 or 3 taking turns unlocking and prying off the lid to the can (my parents now cinch up the handles with bungee cords; it’s only a matter of time until the ravens figure those out).

Corvid perception also allows these birds to recognize individuals of other species, and even specific vehicles. In one example in the book, a Seattle woman fed crows regularly from her silver Toyota. The crows would recognize her car when she pulled into a crowded parking lot and would follow her to her job as a school bus driver. In fact, the flock (or murder) became so pernicious that her boss would not allow her to park within 100 yards of the bus lot.

Corvids can also recognize unfriendly humans as well, and will mob and scold anyone who has irritated them. One man actually moved to a new house after incurring the wrath of a neighborhood crow, who would dive bomb him when he left the house and follow him from window to window of his house, screeching at him through the glass. Apparently, no one holds a grudge like a crow.

Far from being a random collection of anecdotes, the book is well organized, with a lot of information about the neurobiology of crows and the scientific experiments that have backed up the informal observations of public. The appendix is particularly interesting (how often do you get to make that claim about a book?), as the authors present detailed anatomical drawings of the crow brain and neural connections. The structures and pathways involved with vocalization, social development, cognition & association and sensory input are nicely rendered and accompanied by explanations of how the crow’s brain processes and uses input and information from its surroundings.

If you don’t already appreciate, or at least acknowledge, the intelligence of ravens and crows, you certainly will by the time you’ve finished this fascinating book.