We know a lot about crows, but we’ll never truly know what these smart creatures think about us. Do they continue to visit us because they view us as friends, or have they simply trained us to give them peanuts every day? For Audubon magazine, Elizabeth Preston explores the delightful world of corvids, offering insight into crow behavior and corvid-human relations.
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?’”
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