Crazy Crow Lady's Spooky Season Corvid Resource Page

 Well - FINALY - it's officially October! The most wonderful time of the year! Costumes, pretty leaves, hypoallergenic air, fantastic seasonal movies, the tastiest squash and some of the best seasonal candy.

And in honor of this and my current Hypermegasuperspin... I think it's time to go all in on celebrating our Halloween eagles!

 I have already talked a bit about why I think crows, ravens, magpies, jays, rooks, jackdaws and all other manner of corvids are, in fact, super cool. And I could resquare the circle by typing up what I already typed up, but just a very tiny taste has already been attempted... 

Oh there's more! I kept it brief and you'll get plenty of "fun facts" strewn in a random conversation still. But needless to say, they are brilliant and have goofy, Machiavellian, don't-give-three-fucks personalities that are both charming and formidable. 

I can kind of lump them all together, as the entire family carries similar traits of intelligence and feistiness to some degree. But of course there are all manner of different kinds of corvid. The family itself is also called "the crow family" more colloquially, so that can make it easy to lump the black ones together at the very least (nobody is gonna mistake a blue jay for a crow). 

And there are 130 birds or more in the corvidae family, so plenty get lost in the mix. But there are some larger categories that are worth distinguishing. 

Crows versus ravens: I heard an expert say if you ever look in the sky and go "that's a huge fucking crow!!!" you prolly saw a raven. Otherwise, they have some distinguishing features beyond size. Ravens are less social and less urban, more likely to travel in pairs instead of a murder/unkindness. They have a longer top beak with much more of a hooked appearance. Their rictal bristles (the feathers that come down over their nose) are longer and they have more prominent hackles (the fluffy feathers about their neck and chin). They have a more croaky natural call than the crow caw. Ravens' tail feathers gather in more of a point, while crows have a fantail that looks evenly snipped. Ravens tend to soar while crows flap. 

Both are wildly intelligent, playful, and excellent mimics. Both will antagonize potential predators with a variety of strategic trolls and are known to adapt tools to enhance their play. When crows and ravens do interact, crows tend to mob crows and are far more often the aggressors. This makes sense, as ravens are a lot more likely to try to eat crow eggs etc. 

There are several different types of crows and ravens, but these differences and similarities tend to apply across species. 

In the US, you're most likely to confuse a crow and a raven, but there are other corvids to throw into the awesome-sauce mix both here and abroad.

Magpies - as featured in the KPDH with a few more eyes and a stylish hat - are also brilliant corvids, with excellent mimicry and surprising reasoning abilities. They also got drip!

Tell me that doesn't look like a crow got into a house of high fashion and went to town! This is a black beaked magpie, a North American bird. The Eurasian magpie is more black and white, but still fashionable as fuck. 

Rooks live in Europe, so not a huge chance of mistake here, but if you are afoot, they are another of the generally black crow-like birds. Rooks stand out for their long daggerish beaks and lack of rictal bristles (juveniles have them but they lose them in the first molt and never regrow). They also have shaggy belly and leg feathers that give them a "shaggy pants" look. Rooks haven't been seen to use tools in the wild like the aforementioned corvids, but they seem more than capable in captivity and have demonstrated similar abilities to plan several steps at a time and problem solve. They are also one of the dopier looking corvids in my personal opinion.

Jackdaws - to me - are like the pony to a crow's horse. 

They are about half the size of a crow and have a silvery gray sheen on the back of the head/neck, as well as those pretty baby blues. While baby crows have blue eyes, they usually darken over time, so if you think you've seen a jackdaw, leave it be because who knows, it could be a baby crow and crow parents are super aggressively protective. Really, though, jackdaws live in Europe so won't see many of them hereabouts. Very social, clever and yadda yadda yadda. Jackdaws are known to share resources with each other at a level beyond chimpanzees. On the darker side they've been documented making mercy killings on sick or injured birds, with the entire flock mobbing them to death (there's evidence crows also might have social executions). 

And then and then... jays! Any number of jays from blue jays to green jays to stellar's jays to Canada jays... they are all corvids! And you will probably never mistake one for a crow: 

But they're clever and out-of-fucks to give just like their brethren. Like all their kin they have fantastic memories, use tools, and will go on the offensive to attack predators en masse. 

The corvidae family also includes nutcrackers and a variety of other "I never realized" birds that don't and won't get as much coverage and which I honestly don't know much about. Really, if I'm obsessing about a corvid, it's one of the above birds. 

What's amazing about corvids... well it's a long list, but I adore how adaptable they are. To the point where you will see them almost anywhere. Many barely fret when they see humans particularly those that prefer to frequent the beaches and other hot spots. They often keep near, even, knowing that we are endlessly littering food for them. 

Yes, this is my current personality. If only I could teach a corvid to sing the chorus from Your Idol, I think we'd hit my forever self!

I thought instead of just putting it all in my own words, I'd round up the best of "what I've been consuming" for anyone else out there looking for a little corvid kick!

Some excellent books to get your corvid juices flowing:  

John Marzluff is a wildlife sciences professor at UW. He has done some of the seminal research on corvids, including the experiment where researchers wore different masks (neanderthal and Dick Cheney) to watch social information about untrustworthy humans disseminate through crow populations.

 In short, crows don't like being caught and tagged and they tend to scold and dive bomb the people who caught them after they're released again. An area of their brains similar to our amygdala activates when they see a "bad person" face versus a neutral face and positive areas of the brain light up for friendly people who regularly feed them. 

Back out in the wild, crows not only remember individual humans over their lifetimes, but also seem to spread information about them to others. Over time, more and more crows learned to dive bomb the untrustworthy mask and to be completely neutral to other masks. 

There are lots of anecdotes about the crows exercising this discrimination. Of course, favored feeders get strange little crow gifts. If one member of a household feeds them while another scolds them, they learn to associate which car belongs to which person and only knock (or even ring the doorbell) when their preferred human is home. They might also, according to anecdote, figure out which car belongs to the scolding partner and exclusively empty their bowls over that car!

Illustration from Gifts of the Crow

At any rate. Marzluff is responsible for a substantial body of corvid research both in the Pacific Northwest, and was involved in the repopulating projects of the Alala crows in Hawaii. He has a ton of other ornithological credits to his name but for corvid lovers, he wrote the book and then wrote another! And they are both delightful!

Gifts of the Crow is a bit more technical than In The Company of Crows and Ravens, but both are fascinating and in-depth studies of how corvids think, socialize and evolve to cohabitate with humans. His work is strongly based in the understanding that crows and humans co-evolve with each other, and the degree to which crows (and many other animals) have adapted to human environments is fascinating.

 Crows, for instance, find somewhat busy highways to drop their walnuts onto so that the cars will crush them. They've also been seen laying out clams on the exit from ferries at just the right time and then coming back to feast forty minutes later. 

 Both books have reams of fascinating and surprising research and are told with beautiful illustrations and inviting narrative.  Probably In the Company of Crows and Ravens is immediately more accessible if you don't want to read a lot of chapters about human and avian neurochemistry, but they're both written for a general audience and are both great reads. 

Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains is a bit off topic in terms of actual corvid research, but she does touch on snakes, squirrels, pigeons, bears, rats, elephants and many more animals. More importantly she provides a framework to view the animals who coexist with us, and the delicate balance between animal-friend and animal-foe in the human framework. Not to mention the millions of ways that we keep throwing ecosystems even more off balance just trying to balance them again in the first place. As crows have often been viewed as pests, harbingers, and straight up evil, they certainly come within that framework. 

Secret Life of the City: How Nature Thrives in the Urban World, by Hanna Hagen Bjorgass. Similar to Pests, secret life turns inward to our human habitats to reinvestigate the creatures and organisms we "control" or take for granted. After realizing her excursion to Antarctica felt awkwardly structured and artificial, the author becomes enamored with a lichen species she finds there only to realize actually thrives at home in her own city. With this small revelation, she decides to start looking for "the wild" within the urban. Crows get their own chapter, as do songbirds (did you know urban songbirds start singing a few hours earlier and that their cries are louder and a higher pitch to be better heard?), gulls, ants, bats, and organisms. 

Her main thesis is that the animals that live in the city evolved to be close to humans - have literally evolved to be less afraid of us - so you can actually really see them in their element in a way you never can in the wilderness, because our very presence changes a purely wild situation. And that there's an intimacy to becoming familiar with the life that surround us. That nature, essentially, is everywhere we look for it and not simply an abstracted and distant experience mostly seen on trips and television. 

There's a commodification of experience that we, particularly us the upper middle class, have brought to "nature" and "travel," and I love that she calls this out. A small acre of land contains more miracles than the human brain could ever fully take us in and that we take so much for granted as we snag stamps on our passport and rarer encounters with "undefiled" nature. 

But we can't stop there... books are awesome, but sometimes watching an animal in person gives so much information. 

There's a ton of content about various corvids in the video world, but a lot of it will get redundant. Once you know the general information about how smart crows are and how they can solve puzzles, it'll turn into a lot of repetition. But there are some very original and consistently fine content as well. 

Crows are aplenty in various youtube compilations, but ravens definitely take the cake for celebrity status. In many parts of the world, a pet raven can never be legally released back into the wild and so many captive ravens and the occasional rescue find themselves in a position for stardom. 

Unless otherwise specified, most of these content providers cast a wide net and can be found on Youtube Insta, Facebook and TikTok. So whatever your preferred medium is, you're probably covered.  

In order of cool to awesomest, here are my favorite Reels/YouTube Ravens:

Moonin Raven - a captive born Portugese Raven, we don't see as much of Moonin's family, but my favorite video is when Moonin gets a hold of a fly swatter after seeing her owner swat a fly and she goes apeshit on those flies! This seems to mostly be a Facebook/Insta channel so I see less of it than some of the others. 

Voron Gosha - A Russian Raven (ворон is Raven in Russian). And since I don't really speak Russian, I know a lot less about their backstory. According to a google translation of the Russian synopsis on their YouTube page, the human came into contact with Gosha in 2020, when he found them as a chick having fallen out of a tree. So technically, the only wild-born raven to take up the main header! As expected, Gosha the Raven plays with a variety of tools, makes strange and innovative noises, explores the nearby woods and otherwise Ravens it up. 

Goron has all the problem-solving curiosity and impishness you'd expect of a raven. There are several videos of them solving complicated puzzles and using improvised tools to do it. We also get Gosha biting the crap out of a flamingo squeaky toy and generally being a playful and affectionate little scamp. 

Loki T Raven - One of the most famous of the online ravens, Loki was bred in captivity and came to Coda Falconry in London when he was 1 years old. His person is Elliot Manarin, a raptor rehab specialist. 

There's a book about Elliot and Loki's bond called Raising Loki. It may have made it onto my kindle for those many days that involve sitting somewhere and waiting for Allan! I try not to recommend books until I'm done with them, but the first half is wildly compelling. Loki came to the Falconry from an abusive owner who then died and left Loki completely alone for weeks before the dealer recovered him and brought him to Elliot and his wife's care. The first year of Loki's tenure was hellish, full of violence and fear, and a lot of trolling of the birds of prey who were Loki's neighbors (and generally much dumber birds). It took an obscene level of persistence and reframing everything to make a connection with this brilliant but traumatized birdie. Just getting to the point where Loki is learning to impress others with mimicry and his mad xylophone skills, and I can absolutely see that little glint of pride and showing off from the videos. 

Loki is super smart and enjoys to make trouble. His signature noises are Gwah, Hubububu, and a variety of clucking clicking noises. You might find him running off with something of Elliot's that he's stolen and refuses to return until he gets a treat. You might also find him cradled in Elliot's arms cooing and making strange staccato noises against his cheek. Bro has pure personality.

Loki seems to be more active on Facebook and Insta, but there are some great longer videos on youtube. 

Fable the Raven - By Wings and Wildlands. The UK is heavy with ravens and raven handlers! Amy the falconer and her family moved out into the Scottish Highlands. They document their lives there on Wings and Wildlands, previously Falconry and Me. Fable is a captive bred Raven born in 2018 and has been with Amy since she was nine months old. Fable's favorite noises are "hello" in the most charming feminine voice. And "boop boop"! She also sings to herself like a human and maybe has been heard to say "What are you doing Fable?" in a yelling kind of voice! Fans send Amy different games and puzzles that they've made, and Fable will entertain any challenge for funsies (and foodsies, but you can tell she gets bored without stimulation). Left alone, she'll spend hours practicing her broad range of noises and watching the world around her. 

She's a big love and likes to bite at Amy's zippers, then give big nuzzes while they are talking. Her youtube has some great longer videos, while Facebook has more shorts

Nicholas Crawford and Ragnar, Firth, Gilbert, Rafe, Elsie... - Nicholas Crawford lives on the Isle of Skye with his (generally offscreen) wife, where he owns Skye Model Boats and helps rehab corvids. In addition to giving a permanent home to Ragnar and Frith, who were bred as pets and thus can never be returned to the wild (UK law). 

He does a lot of selfie cam monologues about the birds, their days, the ways to take care of ravens, and so on while various creatures interrupt making funny noises, stealing his things and beaking at him. He considers himself a member of Ragnar and Frith's flock, and you can tell. 

Ragnar has the biggest personality, as he enjoys seeing himself on the selfie cam and likes to ham for the camera and show off all of his vocal skills. About 5 years old, and over 3 pounds of bird making farting noises, saying "tickle" in a deep ominous voice that, well, tickles me, and making bizarre clicking noises which he seems to find hilarious. 

Firth is typically more shy, but very beautiful and full of popping noises. 

Side note: I love that ravens are seen as these gothic ominous creature when every raven I've seen is a completely derpy goof. 

Nicholas also has wild birds who've come to be permanent residents: Gilbert, the hooded crow; Morgan the micro-Rook; Elsie the ancient crow. 

Gilbert

He also has taken in many birds temporarily. Either as hospice or to release back into the wild.

Jeremy the Rook is being wilded back out and has all kinds of drama with Ragnar in the meantime (Rags doesn't like him much and would like him to leave already). 

A baby raven, Rafe, was bonded with Frith and Ragnar, who are now raising him mostly independently, because he will be wilded after he's about twelve months. 

Jeremy and Rafe's return to the wild will be a meticulous process that will take nearly a year to fully accomplish.  

Nicholas is also an artist and has sketches and paintings of all the corvids he's cared for.  

Anyways, aside from loving Nicholas Crawford himself (I like all the bird nerds, really) I think this is my favorite channel because you get a lot of interactions between ravens and crows and other corvids. They teach each other, fight with each other, hold grudges, and otherwise just have so much personality! It's beyond rich.

He's actually new to youtube and has many more videos back on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, so I linked to Facebook. 

Beyond the celebrity Ravens, there's also The Raven Diaries, which is more of a documentary style series by Rick and Diana Bouffard who seem to be jacks and jills of all trades, but also apparently dig ravens a lot. Years ago, they ended up taking in a baby raven whom they taught how to fly, and since then it's been a passion project to make educational films about the birds as they travel through Utah and California. They have short films on a number of raven related topics, including footage of juvenile ravens trolling seagulls, and a group of ravens teasing a bear for kicks. This isn't made by an expert in the field, but by somebody who really loves and enjoys (his take on crows versus ravens is pretty weak on actual information about crows, but the footage is still fun).

It's not just Ravens, though!

There's also: 

Krari the Crow - A channel maintained by Alexandra Rösch and Florian Zeitz. Alexandra Rösch is a teacher and a nature mentor. Florian Zeitz is a teacher and children's book author. They live in Germany and have a family of hooded crows in their area: Krari, Kruu and their offspring. It has a bit more of a nature documentary vibe than a lot of these channels. 

Some of the shorts are very peaceful - just classical music over a bird coming to eat on the patio. Others are more educational. the connection is a little less personal, because the birds are wild and because they come from a nature education background. One of the things I do appreciate about this channel is that the crows are hooded crows, meaning they are both black and an opalescent grey coloring, and I do really enjoy the narrator's voice. She sounds very warm. With the chill background music, it's very much a "waking up in the background" kind of relax vibe. 

The Crow Lady: North American representation. If you feed the crows in your neighborhood, in time they might start being your friend (or maybe they'll crap on your car!) Anyways, this is the account of somebody living in a typical suburban neighborhood who's made buddies with the local crows. They hang out on her fence, land on her hat, make any variety of funny crow noises and generally eat her food while letting her get close up. While certain personalities emerge, it's largely more of a slice of murder! It makes me think of our neighborhood walks. I love this channel because she has a number of crow cams in her yard that allow very up close vide of the crows interacting with both her and each other (and occasionally dismembering an earthworm). It's like going on a nature observation walk without leaving the house! 

Corvid Research: Kaeli Swift is the author of the Corvid Research blog as well as maintaining this instagram. She wrote her PhD on crow behavior around death. Oh and she's also connected to UW as a visiting lecturer. She has a Wednesday feature on her insta where you see pictures of corvids and guess if they are a crow or no. Distinguishing crows and ravens should be easy, but it can get tricky!

And a bit further abreast! If you like jays and songbirds, may I recommend...

Leslie the Bird Nerd: A bit more focused on backyard birds, but she has an extensive series on an extended family of blue jays in her yard. They get up to all kinds of soap opera shenanigans and mate swapping, so it can be a fun watch. She also of course documents all other manner of "backyard birds" who live in her general area (I believe it's Virginia, though she has a thick Florida accent which throws me off every time). I am using her videos to get a broader understanding of the other birds in our neighborhood as well.

And, well, that's more than enough to get anyone started. 

If I had to recommend just a little flavor a day, I would go with Fable with Wings and Wildland, Loki the Raven, or Nicholas Crawford. But if they can't fill your content quotia, well, there's plenty more where that came from!

In my October descent into Crazy Crow Lady, I'm trying to befriend a few local crows. So far to minimal avail. But I hear it takes time. I have managed to feed a few (get their attention from a distance, leave the food somewhere, walk away and observe from a distance that they have immediately walked over to your food and started cawing for their friends). This is weirdly satisfyihg and since crows have coevolved to live with people, I don't feel particularly poorly for feeding local wildlife. Given crows will hunt you and your family down dead if you mess with them, I am not too worried about a little food making them "too trusting of humans."  And honestly, they seem perfectly content to just tear up our lawn going after grubs if you don't feed them, so... 

I've been leaving some food out on our table as well, but I'm told it takes time and consistency to lure any of them into your actual domain. 

Hard to compete with garbage day: 

A handful of these babies were watching stealthily as the garbage men did their work this morning. As soon as the truck left, they came down and found all the little bits and bobs that had been dropped in the process.

 

Then, having grabbed what they could, they took off in the direction of the garbage truck! I can only assume that they were continuing along its route!

But, well, I can only try. This morning, we came back from our morning school visit to see a couple of crows on the fence checking things out. They flew away when we came into the yard, but at least they know it's there now. 

Yes, basically I found Bumble BFF too terrifying and Meetup was confusing, so I'm trying alternate means to enhance my social life. CAW CAW CAW!!!

Happy Corvid Month!