I admit, Australia has America beat, in the category of evil genius super-bird species.  There are hella parrots there and corvids too.  But our reigning champ of world-beating nasty little punk emeff gangster birds does well for itself.  So well, it’s been mentioned in most of my posts about other birds thus far.  The american crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos, is the number one bird species in tha land.  Maybe some others have them outnumbered by a bit – smaller, mouse-like species – but crow numbers are still massive.  You can’t go a day without seeing or hearing crows.  In my little suburban town, some flocks can rival groups of pigeons and starlings.  Hundreds within line of sight, possibly part of a posse running to the low thousands.  I don’t think it was like this when I was a child.  There was a population boom in the mid to late nineties, I think?  And maybe there has been another one since then.

They’re numerous, they’re strong enough to bully, they’re conspicuous, they’re noisy, and they’re smart.  I find this interesting because if you look at them next to the other corvids of the area – steller’s jays and california scrub jays – they look like clumsy cowardly scruffy losers.  The jays are more well-groomed and light on their feet, fast and maneuverable enough in flight that they feel more secure in their ability to get away from a predator.  But who wins?  A thick-bodied, big-brained generalist animal.  It’s like comparing humans to gibbons.  Lesser apes have prettier colors and can run circles around us, practically fly through trees – but we still win.

Crows are us and we are crows.  They’re our heirs apparent, I think.  When it all goes to hell for us, their populations will suffer, but they’re too cool to fall.  Just waiting in the parking lot for our time to end, so they can pick our bones clean.  Ravens have more of a rep as portentous birds of doom, but they’re afraid of crows.  They know who’s winning.

But maybe crows aren’t as impressive as they seem.  In my region a girl famously began a relationship of commerce with the birds, trading treats for random objects.  Basically, crows are on a path to learning capitalism, and thus following in our footsteps.  Bad birds.  It’s the company they keep.  It was discovered by scientists in Seattle that crows can recognize human faces for years, in an experiment that involved wearing dick cheney masks.  When the masks were flipped upside down, the crows would flip their heads to process what they were looking at.  Clown behavior.  Don’t look up to humans, guys.

American crows look most similar to Europe’s carrion crows – blacker than a blackbird, around a pound, rude little dudes.  Once I was at a ferry terminal and saw some behaving in a way I hadn’t noticed before.  The slightly smaller crow had a brownish cast to its feathers, and seemed belligerent, bossing the blacker one around for food and attention.  Subject to human prejudices and armed with just enough knowledge to mislead myself, I assumed the smaller one was a female, the larger one male.  Like when a conventionally attractive and smooth dude has a gf who is a bug-eyed goblin, witch cackler, cigarette dripping off her lip, grabbing her crotch in public.  You know the type.  But no, the smaller one was baby, the smoother one was probably mom.

Probably, but crows are very sociable beasts.  Not as wild as acorn woodpeckers whose default social arrangement is a multi-parent polycule, but who feeds baby crows?  Everybody, including cousins and older siblings.  Baby crows start with a pink mouth and a voice like a kazoo, the mouth turning black and voice filling out with maturity.  When I hear that kazoo call, I always think, that’s a pinkmouth.

Some experiences I and others have had with american crows:

Balcony clods.  When feeding birds on the balcony of my old apartment, we observed the crows were too fearful to descend onto the balcony floor, only landing on the railing.  Meanwhile, smaller birds with better acceleration would land wherever they pleased.  It’s like how cats will be very brave around dogs that are on the far side of a fence or window.  They just don’t look like they’re so much larger than jays that they should be less adroit, but they are.  They can’t move as fast on land, can’t take flight as quickly.  Not even close.  Earlier I analogized it humans:gibbons::crows:jays:.  Another one that would fit is crow:jay::wolverine:marten.  These wolverines can fit a lot of peanuts in their throats.

The Killer.  I once saw a lone crow murdering a starling on the roof of a barbershop.

The Murder.  I once saw a murder of crows take a not-quite-fledged pigeon out of a nest and start killing it in the drive-thru at Del Taco.

The Harasser.  I have seen mobs of crows harass bald eagles and red-tailed hawks more times than I can easily recall.

Seal Food.  Visiting a rose garden at Point Defiance, near the zoo in Tacoma, we saw a crow with something large and shiny in his grip.  It was a chunk of fish we figured was almost certainly stolen from pinnipeds in the pokey.  A hot score.

Tool Use.  I’ve seen a crow with a tool so perfect I wondered if it it had fashioned the thing itself.  It was a short, clean, sharp stick, like a length of a food skewer that had been broken off, and it was held just right in the beak to function like the beak of a northern flicker, punching holes in wet sod to let tasty bugs and worms out.

Rain Birds.  When it rains out, crows are not fazed at all. If anything, they become more active at ground feeding, snatching all the earthworms that come to the surface.  The robins try as well, and maybe this is my imagination, but they seem just a touch more cowardly about the elements.

Salty Dogs.  There was a named subspecies of crow in the PNW that was demoted, not considered distinct enough.  The chief supposed difference was greater comfort in a coastal biome.  There’s a little state park we like to go to with a rocky / sandy beach and some scratchy grass.  A little creek there runs out of the woods and into Puget Sound, and the crows like to play in it, to bathe, and to glean food of some kind.  Oh, and they like to soften stolen potato chips by dunking them in the water.  Those crows are scruffier than usual, with weirdly clumped feathers and patchiness.  They seem like scurvy old scalawags.  We call them salty dogs.

Mimicry.  Crows hardly ever do mimicry that we can recognize, at least, not in our company.  But they can do it, and sometimes, they seem to enjoy it – learning a single sound and repeating it just to show off.  The one time I’ve noticed this was in a ghetto of Federal Way, where a single crow liked to make this sound somewhere between a cat and a baby.  I’d write it out as “mmBAHdul.”  It was much more musical and soft than their usual noises, leading me to wonder how good they could get at mimicry – and also what the hell it was imitating, of course.  I can’t tell crows apart 90% of the time, so in having a signature sound, this one did a good job of making its personal identity known.

Funsters.  When my husband was a kid, he saw crows messing with a piece of loose shingle on an apartment roof.  Not only did they keep coming back to flip it around, they’d go get friends to come back and check it out together.  Charming.  His mother likes to tell about how she saw one get a big worm on a rainy day and seemingly do a happy dance.  Was it just trying to shake the worm to death?  Hopping in surprise at how big the thing was?  Or do they dance for joy?  I don’t know.

Revenance.  Last but not least, sometimes when a soul dies with some unfinished vengeance type business and Jeet Kune Do skills, a crow brings their soul back from the land of the dead, to kong foo some jokers into moist chunks.  Did you know that The Crow was always a rip-off of a way worse Charlie Sheen movie called The Wraith?  The comic artist used the names of the killer gang directly, and the filmmakers reproduced that plagiarism without knowing.  True shit.  The Wraith was kinda fun tho.  It had pre- Twin Peaks Sherilyn Fenn in it – blonde.  Audrey Horne fans cry blood now.

Anyway, crows.  Ready to clean your skull when you die.  Give it up smooth; ain’t no telling when they’re down for a jack move.

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