Long time ago I was amusing myself during coffee breaks by throwing some dry biscuits to the crows around the building. I enjoyed watching how clever they were, sometimes they dipped the biscuit first into a pot that had collected some water to make it softer. Sometimes there were more crows than I had biscuits and after two crows fought over the last biscuit for a while, the loser came to me seemingly asking for one more. I didn't have any, so I just ignored it, but I distinctly remember the feeling that the crow was somehow upset with me.
About a week later I was going for lunch on the same campus and out of nowhere I felt a big hit on my head, my cap even fell down. Looking up I saw that a crow was above me, so it must have just hit me (or was trying to take my cap off). Maybe it was just a coincidence, but I like to think it was the same crow still angry with me. Never before or after was I touched by a crow in any way.
I used to have an office with a view on a group of crows nesting in tree. They were super entertaining. One day I watched a pair of them build a nest. Two other views watched then carrying in branches. When the two had left, they walked over and took the branches for their own nest. After a day the first couple realized what’s going on and went out in shifts.
They also liked to poop on certain people but not on others.
Pigeons do that too (stick theft). Sticks are a valuable resource, though some are evidently worth more than others. Bird brains are probably tuned for rapid stick assessment.
> Bird brains are probably tuned for rapid stick assessment.
I don’t think this is true, birds use all sorts of things to make their nests, including improvising with human objects if there are no sticks. Many don’t use sticks at all (e.g. glueing grass and leaves together with mud). Crows and pigeons in particular are probably smart enough to recognize a “good stick” as a valuable structural material based on physical principles, and can easily transfer that understanding to other “sticks” made of metal, plastic, etc. Note that for crows the assessment is not “rapid”, they play with sticks before deciding to accept or reject them: https://corvidresearch.blog/2016/03/29/everything-you-want-t...
Well, alright. They see things in sticks that I don't, is all. Nesting pigeons generally didn't prefer my suggested sticks when I tried providing some: probably too neat, lacking structural potential, since they have to be hooked and wedged and woven together.
I always tell my kid, be nice to crows, they've got a long memory.
I keep trying to feed them, but while there are crows in the neighborhood, they rarely fly near our house. I wonder if someone on the block was mean to them, once.
Do they really have long memories, or are they just jerks, and people who feel guilty about something they've done mistakenly think their behavior is related?
I ask because I've been dive bombed by crows twice in my life while just peacefully walking, and I've never done anything to them. So I know they can be jerks for no reason.
On a slate-gray Sunday morning last month, a man in an ogre mask trudged across the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle. He passed prospective students and their parents, who paused their tour of the school to gawk at this person stalking the grounds looking like an actor in a low-budget Halloween thriller.
The character in the mask was John Marzluff, a professor who has spent his career studying human-crow interaction. Dr. Marzluff has developed a high regard for the birds’ intelligence. He describes crows as “flying monkeys,” because of their aptitude as well as their large brains relative to their size.
How long do crows hold a grudge? Dr. Marzluff believes he has now answered the question: around 17 years.
His estimate is based on an experiment that he began in 2006 on the Washington campus. Dr. Marzluff captured seven crows with a net while wearing that ogre mask. The birds were soon set free, but, Dr. Marzluff says, the episode traumatized the crows and other members of the murder that witnessed it.
To test how long the campus’s birds would hold onto their grudge, Dr. Marzluff or his research assistants would put on the ogre mask periodically and walk around campus, recording how many crows let out aggressive caws, a sound that experts call scolding. The number of scolding crows crescendoed around seven years into the experiment, when around half the crows he encountered cawed vociferously.
Over the next decade, according to data Dr. Marzluff has collected but not yet published, the numbers of grudge-holding crows gradually tapered off.
During his September walk, Dr. Marzluff recorded in his notebook that he had encountered 16 crows. And for the first time since the experiment began, they all ignored him.
Christian Blum, a cognitive scientist specializing in animal behavior at the University of Vienna, conducted a similar multiyear experiment partly inspired by Dr. Marzluff’s work, using ravens, which are cousins to crows in the corvid family.
“They are also excellent grudge holders,” Dr. Blum said of ravens.
In the study, which ran from 2011 to 2015, Dr. Blum and his colleagues wore a mask and carried a dead raven past an aviary filled with live ravens. They then donned a different mask, a control, and walked through without the dead raven.
Just as in Dr. Marzluff’s experiment, the ravens scolded the “dangerous” mask — even without any dead raven present — with much higher frequency than they did the control. And the scolding lasted for the duration of the experiment, suggesting that ravens’ grudges were also very long lasting.
I have read stories of crows bringing gifts to people who treated them well, and there is an account in this article of two crows who were fed by a person then guarding that person from an aggressive crow.
The article says they're not great at differentiating between individuals that look similar. They may be dive-bombing you because someone who looks a bit like you once mistreated them.
About a week later I was going for lunch on the same campus and out of nowhere I felt a big hit on my head, my cap even fell down. Looking up I saw that a crow was above me, so it must have just hit me (or was trying to take my cap off). Maybe it was just a coincidence, but I like to think it was the same crow still angry with me. Never before or after was I touched by a crow in any way.
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