One of the Smartest Birds Ever

This is a nice series of three burst photos captured by the trail camera closest to the house. 

click on images for a closer look

Meet Corvus brachyrhynchos - the American Crow. 

A common, year-round, resident here on the peninsula this is an all-black bird – including plumage, legs and feet and beak.  The raven shares some similarities with the American Crow but is measurably larger.   

The third photo in the series illustrates one common field mark differentiated this bird from a raven.  It is a fan-shaped tail.  The tail of a crow is squared – ravens have a wedge-shaped tail. 

Crows are typically found in large groups and ravens travel in pairs.  Crows caw and ravens croak.  This bird mates for life and can live up to twenty years in the wild.  A highly social bird - juvenile siblings assist in the raising of chicks. 

Decidedly intelligent - this bird rates right up there in the intelligence quotient with mammals such as chimpanzees and dolphins.  Proportionate to body weight their brains are roughly fifty percent larger than our own.  A raven is even smarter. 

The sight of a dead crow tends to attract as many as a hundred live crows.  Strangely they will not touch the deceased and will not scavenge their own.  Is this a funerary rite?  Scientists have suggested that the mass gathering is part of a survival strategy – namely to learn about the threat in the encounter of a dead crow and subsequently avoiding the location even in the presence of food. 

This is a bird capable using simple tools, mimicking other birds and human voices, reading traffic lights, recognizing faces and collectively defending one-another. 

Although a flock of crows is called a murder the term is rather undeserved as this bird is really quite family and community oriented. 

You can learn much more about this fascinating bird here.