The Crow

Ohhh, crows are fantastic. Smart, spooky, social, petty, loyal—honestly, they’re like little feathered noir detectives with wings.
Here’s the full crow rundown 🖤
What crows are (and why they’re special)
Crows belong to the corvid family, which also includes ravens, magpies, and jays. Among birds, corvids sit at the top tier of intelligence—right up there with parrots and some primates.
They’re found almost everywhere in the world, thriving in forests, farms, cities, coastlines, and graveyards alike. If humans can live somewhere, chances are crows can too—and often better.
Intelligence that borders on unsettling
Crows don’t just act smart; they think.
They can solve multi-step puzzles
They use tools (sticks, wires, even bending objects to hook food)
They understand cause and effect
They can plan for the future, not just react to the present
They recognize themselves as individuals, not just instinct-driven animals
One of the wildest facts:
Crows can recognize human faces and remember them for years. If you’re kind to a crow, it may bring you gifts—shiny objects, coins, bits of glass. If you’re cruel? That crow will remember… and teach other crows to hate you too.
Yes. They hold grudges. Generational grudges.
Social lives: families, alliances, and drama
Crows are deeply social.
They live in family groups
Young crows often stay with parents for years
They help raise siblings like babysitters
They communicate constantly through complex calls and body language
A group of crows is called a murder, which feels dramatic until you see them mob a hawk or owl with military coordination. Then it feels… accurate.
They warn each other about danger, share food sources, and even appear to comfort one another when stressed.
Crow funerals (yes, really)
When a crow dies, others gather around the body. These gatherings—often called crow funerals—aren’t mourning in a human sense, but they are meaningful.
Crows are:
Investigating the cause of death
Learning what dangers exist in the area
Passing that information to others
Still, the sight of silent black birds perched around a fallen crow? It hits something ancient in the human brain.
Voices and communication
Crows don’t just “caw.”
They have:
Alarm calls
Greeting calls
Territorial warnings
Calls for specific predators
Sounds that differ by region (crow accents!)
Some crows can even mimic human speech, dogs, car alarms, and other birds. Not as cleanly as parrots—but eerie enough when you’re not expecting it.
Memory that rivals mammals
Crows remember:
Food cache locations for months
Faces of people who helped or harmed them
Specific places where danger occurred
Individual birds they’ve interacted with before
They also fake cache food if they know another crow is watching—pretending to hide it, then moving it later when unobserved. That’s theory of mind. That’s deception. That’s advanced cognition.
Crows and humans: a long shared history
Across cultures, crows are loaded with symbolism:
Messengers between worlds (Celtic, Norse)
Symbols of death and rebirth
Tricksters and truth-tellers
Omens—sometimes bad, sometimes protective
Odin had two ravens (close cousins of crows):
Huginn (Thought) and Muninn (Memory)
Which feels very on-brand.
In modern cities, crows have adapted beautifully—using traffic to crack nuts, nesting on buildings, and exploiting human routines better than most wildlife.
Why people feel drawn to them
Crows have presence.
They watch.
They remember.
They seem to know things.
They don’t flinch from darkness or noise. They’re comfortable in liminal spaces—dawn, dusk, graveyards, battlefields, empty parking lots at sunrise. That’s probably why writers, poets, and photographers (yeah, you) feel their pull.
Final crow truth
Crows aren’t just birds.
They’re observers of human behavior, survivors of our messes, and quiet witnesses to history. If you treat them well, they’ll remember you. If you ignore them, they’ll still watch.
And if a crow ever looks you dead in the eye for just a beat too long?
It’s not coincidence.
It’s recognition.