Are Crows Really Our Friends?

When my family and I visited my sister Annie in California last summer, I was excited to see her new house—but more excited to meet a neighbor she’d told me a lot about. Despite being a frequent visitor, the neighbor didn’t make an appearance at first; maybe he was spooked by my clamorous kids. A couple of days later, though, I came face-to-beak with Sal in a narrow side yard. Looking above the succulents and wildflowers, Sal met my gaze with an air of appraisal so frank that, coming from a person, it would have been rude. Then the glossy black American Crow flew away.Annie first met Sal in early 2024, soon after she and her partner, Jack, moved into their house. She was removing old landscaping fabric when a crow landed on the fence and looked at her curiously. She pointed to where the lifted tarp had exposed fresh soil and was intrigued when the bird swooped down and grabbed a worm. “It seemed like Sal understood,” she says.American Crows all look more or less identical to the human eye. But Annie and Jack came to recognize Sal, a bold character with a distinctive hop due to a bad leg, and began offering the bird unsalted peanuts. The treats attracted a second, more timid crow, whose deformed foot also distinguished it. They called Sal’s buddy Pal. Within a few weeks, Annie and Jack were buying peanuts in bulk. Using food as a reward, they trained the two corvids to pay them regular visits.Or did they? Annie wondered whether, from the crows’ perspective, it might be the other way around.After all, the humans were also rewarded. When Annie opened the curtains in the morning, she looked forward to seeing the crows swoop down to land on her fence, seemingly greeting her. When she came outside, they might say hello with a swoosh of their wings or perch on a patio chair opposite her as she worked on her laptop. The way Sal and Pal had come to trust her was gratifying, and she felt even more honored by their attention when she learned that the crows had full social calendars; it turned out one neighbor knew Sal as Russell. “Clearly they have so much else going on,” Annie says. “It felt like they had these busy lives that we were fitting into.” When it comes to corvid–human connections, Annie isn’t the only one who wonders who’s training whom. Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, has developed bonds with many crows at his home and on campus. Such a relationship, he says, “absolutely alters my behavior.” If, for instance, he forgets to bring peanuts for the birds at his university, he takes an alternate route around school. “I’ll find myself sneaking across campus in a tunnel or through buildings,” he says, “because I feel so bad when I run into them.”Like Bergstrom and my sister, many people form sustained personal connections with their local crows. Those who do often consider the attention of these charismatic corvids a privilege and a source of joy. Some even call the animals their friends. What’s harder to determine, though, is whether the crows return the feeling. At the most basic level, crows likely view humans who feed them as a means of survival. Our yards may provide a safe place  to congregate and forage. A Red-tailed Hawk that might strike in an open field may be more reluctant to swoop onto a small lawn. When people put out treats, it only sweetens the deal.Sometimes crows will seemingly leave “gifts” for people who feed them, which recipients often view as a thank-you. But these offerings—keys, coins, stones, and, in Bergstrom’s case, possibly a ring his daughter had lost—may have a simpler explanation. Anne B. Clark, a retired Binghamton University behavioral ecologist who studied urban crows, says that in all videos she’s seen of this behavior, the birds were very young. Juveniles frequently carry and play with interesting objects, she says. So a crow may simply be dropping what’s already in its beak to pick up food. “My own opinion is that crows are not terribly interested in us,” Clark says.Still, inadvertent actions may become strategic. The crows, ravens, and rooks in the genus Corvus are among the world’s most intelligent animals. Some can fashion tools or operate complicated devices to get food. If a crow notices that it’s rewarded when leaving objects for people, it might continue to do so. “It’s not a heavy lift for a smart animal,” says corvid biologist John Marzluff, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington.Yet many people who receive attention from crows feel that the birds have more complex motives. “It seemed like they would just come by to hang out,” my sister tells me—like, well, friends.What is a friend, anyway? For a scholarly perspective, I spoke to Thom van Dooren, a field philosopher at the University of Sydney and author of The Wake of Crows, a 2019 book about the entangled lives of humans and these corvids. He believes crows relate to people in ways that meet several conditions for friendship.Criterion one: You must know a friend from a stranger. “In order to strike up a friendship, you have to be the kinds of organisms who can firstly recognize one another as individuals,” he says. Here, the avians have an advantage. While people struggle to tell crows apart, crows are startlingly good at identifying us. It makes sense. Crows live a long time—Clark has known individuals as old as 19—and it pays for them to recall their enemies and allies.In experiments, urban crows held long grudges against people who mistreated them, cawing harshly and forming mobs upon seeing the face of their persecutor—even years later. My sister’s crow companions knew her when she had a different haircut or wore a hat or sunglasses. Crows recognized Bergstrom in a new jacket with the hood up. Walking around different parts of town, he sometimes encounters a crow who seems to know him; a bird will land nearby and look at him expectantly. When he returned to campus after a year away, crows greeted him immediately, Bergstrom says: “Sort of, ‘Where the hell have you been?’”But noticing a familiar face in a crowd does not make a friendship. You need to share experiences, too. Among their kind, many crows form prolonged family relationships; juveniles often stay home for a few years to help parents care for young siblings. They turn their social awareness to us, too. The way crows not only recognize humans but also pay attention to our gaze—meeting our eyes, following where we look—suggests van Dooren’s next criterion: intersubjective engagement, or two conscious minds meeting each other and sharing a reality.What’s more, a friendship can’t be strictly utilitarian, van Dooren says. Crows who get to know humans must be after more than peanuts and protection. “I think there’s all sorts of interesting motivations for these behaviors that are about curiosity, exploration—just leading an interesting life,” he says. (Keeping entertained is, of course, its own kind of utility.)A few years ago, one of Marzluff’s graduate students trained birds to perform a task inspired by Aesop’s fable “The Crow and the Pitcher.” Four of 16 crows learned to drop stones in a tube of water to get a cheese puff. Later, when viewing the apparatus while in a brain scanner, the successful birds had different neural activity patterns than their less competent peers. Like a skier on a mountaintop visualizing a next run, “they were basically reliving that experience,” Marzluff says. In other words, the crows were telling themselves a kind of story. This suggests one more requirement for friendship, van Dooren says. You need to be “able to make sense of your life as a narrative,” he says, before you can get to know its recurring characters. We will never know what crows are thinking, but as storytelling creatures ourselves, we’re primed to see crows as players in our lives—each friendship a narrative carried out on a small stage, maybe in a park or across a picnic table. Yet the saga of humanity’s relationship with corvids has taken place on a larger scale, across millennia. In their book In the Company of Crows and Ravens, Marzluff and his coauthor Tony Angell argue that these birds and humans have experienced “cultural coevolution.” In prehistoric times, ravens and crows began to hang around places where people hunted or fished and scavenged some of our haul. As the corvids became our companions and competitors, we developed customs to drive them away. We hunted them, chased them, erected scarecrows. Our habits shaped one another’s.The ever-present birds also influenced mythologies around the world. The raven, often portrayed as a shape-shifter or trickster, is an important figure for Indigenous peoples in North America. In a legend of the Haida, for example, Raven discovers the first humans hiding inside a clamshell. Meanwhile, ancient Greeks associated crows with the god Apollo and named a constellation Corvus. (Don’t squint too hard seeking a bird in the night sky; the stars form what looks like a rhombus.)Corvids appear in more modern lore, too, from Poe to Hitchcock. But now that fewer people farm, hunt, or otherwise concern themselves with the scavengers, the birds probably aren’t molding our culture as strongly as they once did. Yet we’re still shaping theirs, Marzluff says. Their keen attention may be key to a friendship that’s singular.