Mom and the Murder of Crows

The other night I watched a fascinating PBS special on crows, the ubiquitous and surprisingly intelligent bird everyone recognizes.*  Among a number of interesting facts, I learned that the crow is a tool-maker--only they are a step beyond the apes: not only do they make tools out of sticks, they make them with a hook on the end to retrieve items they need.  They mate for life and they have communities with shared duties, like feeding the young.  They can recognize human faces; and most astonishingly, they can teach their young to fear the same face.

But their problem solving abilities are far more complex than, until recently, scientists had reckoned.  The video included an experiment where a crow, if he wanted to fetch a tasty chunk of meat, had to use a long stick to pull it from a tube; but the long stick was in another cage and they had to use a shorter stick to first pull the long stick within reach before they could use the long stick to reach the meat.  Quickly done.  And then they moved the experiment to a third problem-solving level: they hung the shorter stick on a piece of string from a bar above the other two cages.  After hopping around a bit, the crow flew to the bar, used his beak and feet to pull up the string with the short stick, detached the stick from the string, carried it down to the cage with the long stick, used it to pull the long stick out, and then took the long stick over and inched the meat to within reach.  It was amazing to watch.

Then there was something even more startling: crows apparently have a concept of death.  They had video and there are records of crows gathering in the treetops over the body of a fallen comrade (I use that term on purpose).  They sat without making a sound for about ten minutes and then flew silently away.  That revelation gave me chills.  What else don’t we know?  And what don’t we know about the intelligence and emotional life of so many animals?

All that brought to mind my mother’s failed attempts to kill a murder of crows (a flock of crows is called a murder, as in a herd of cows, a colon of ants, a battery of barracudas, and a murder of crows).  We lived on a farm and crows were constantly in the garden, eating seeds, vegetables, sprouts, and just about anything else--crows are omnivores.  She tried scarecrows, a misnomer if ever there was one; they perched on them to better see the goodies in the garden.  She spent box after box of 4-10 gauge shotgun shells in a vain attempt to kill even a single crow; she had heard that by hanging the body of a crow near the garden, they would stay away.  She never got a one.  She claimed, and now I believe her, that they knew the exact range of the 4-10.  She would fire and miss.  She would move ten feet closer to them and they would fly ten feet away.  It was uncanny.  And for Mom, infuriating.  ‘Possums weren’t so lucky.  She hated them too as they would kill chickens in the henhouse for the fun of it, or so she claimed.  But then ’possums are about as intelligent as this stapler here on my desk.  She slaughtered them right and left.  Crows?  Nary a one.

She would have loved this video as she later, once the farm had been sold, became an avid birdwatcher.  Although I doubt if she ever grew to like crows; they would steal seeds from her favorite bird feeders!

*http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/a-murder-of-crows/full-episode/5977/