Hello, Mr. Crow: Making feathered friends in the cool crowd

The other day, from my back balcony, I spotted an aerial show that at once felt wild and unscripted. The skies were filled with noisy birds that circled overhead, angling for advantage, like squadrons of onyx-black attack bombers.

From my vantage point, I could make out two groups, each alighting from the tops of two adjacent redwoods, scores of birds in all, trading strategic perches amid the treetops, calling out, invading each other’s air space in controlled chaos. 

Reinforcements flew in from all directions, in clutches two and three, to join the massing action. I cursed myself that I didn’t have a pair of binoculars.

This was no murmuration, no flock of starlings instinctually flitting about in poetic synchronicity; it was something highly intelligent and calculated. My wife and I couldn’t take our eyes off those birds.

“What’s going on?” she finally asked. “What are they?”

“They’re crows,” I whispered. “And I think they’re at war.”

I’m certainly no bird-watcher, but I’m fascinated by crows. There’s something about their singular intelligence, photographic memories, problem-solving skills and complex social behavior. And of course those wonderfully-obtuse personalities. 

They’re smaller cousins to the majestic raven, the deep-croaking bird that once haunted the dreams of Edgar Allen Poe. Both birds hail from the winged Corviedae family, known for human-like characteristics.

Crows are just bad-ass. They use logic to employ rudimentary tools. They solve puzzles. They even mourn their dead. Crows can make friends with humans, and exact retribution on their enemies. They recognize faces. They hold grudges. 

When I was a kid, I watched the Heckle & Heckle cartoons featuring those two opportunistic TV scavengers. One spoke with a British accent, the other with a Brooklyn twist. They both had attitudes. They were actually magpies, a crow cousin, but what did I know? I thought they were crows.

And for a kid like me, crows were cool. 

A college pal and I later modeled our behavior on those two irascible miscreants. We were Heckle and Jeckle. We heckled and we jeckled. We shoplifted. We hitchhiked. We were boozers. We smoked dope. Hell, we were dopes. We did a robot dance in the middle of traffic intersections. We wore animal masks onto city buses. Once like two unknown comics, we wore paper bags with holes for eyes into an exclusive Buffalo disco until drunk celebrants tried to rip the bags from our heads. We ran for our lives.

My own personal conduct has since evolved — along with research into crow behavior. 

We’ve seen how the birds can memorize traffic patterns to drop nuts on roads and wait for cars to crack them. They have blurred the line between wild and civilized. To me they’re almost human.

Crows don’t forget their enemies. In a 2006 study, mask-wearing students harassed resident crows on the University of Washington campus by netting and banding them. When students later returned wearing different masks, the crows ignored them; the birds only responded when they saw the original masks. They cawed to one another. and swooped in for some old-school crow vengeance. Not just one bird, but entire bands of pissed-off crows, with “loud scolding cries and the formation of small mobs.”

These tough little customers continued to menace the masked individuals for years. After nearly a decade, they did not forgive; they did not forget. Their ire even increased over time. The feud eventually involved crows not present for the original harassment.

No wonder crow clutches are known as murders.

One wicked Internet story, headlined “How to Befriend Crows and Turn Them Against Your Enemies,” lays out the tactic: Confront crows wearing a mask resembling an adversary, then watch the action. “Word will spread among the birds, and every time your enemies walk the streets, crows will gather” the post said. “They will glare at them. They will screech their disapproval at your enemies’ very existence. Your enemies will have no idea why, either. But there will be more and more crows every day. And it’s not going to stop. Not today. Not ever.”

I live by a simple rule: Don’t mess with crows. When I pass a few of my scrappy neighbors hopping about, I pay them the utmost respect, like I would members of any winged street gang.

“Good morning Mr. Crow,” I usually say. “How is your day going?”

I just don’t want no trouble. And my strategy has worked out just fine. So far.

Not long ago, my wife and I returned to our parked car in San Francisco. Eying us from a nearby fence post was a black bird large enough to be a raven.

My wife shuddered. We had other plans in the city. But not anymore. 

“Let’s go home,” she said. “Our day is ruined. We’ve been cursed by a crow.”

My Chinese-born wife comes from a culture where crows represent impending calamity, a streak of cursed luck. They’re seen as omens, tricksters, or messengers from the otherworld. There’s even a Mandarin phrase about speaking “with a black crow mouth,” which means wishing doom on others.

American slang also takes its shot at the birds. To “crow” about something means to brag and “eating crow” describes the humiliation of being proven wrong on a boastful claim. As scavengers, the idea goes, crows would taste terrible.

After our brush with the black-winged harbinger of doom, I convinced my wife to have dinner in North Beach. Later, as we stood with a dozen pedestrians waiting to cross at a traffic light, a car materialized out of nowhere and ran the light, careening right toward us. 

We all gasped as the vehicle barely missed hitting my wife before shooting off without stopping. Others asked if she was OK. She was not. She’d almost been run down. And it was because of that crow.

After that, I became a self-appointed crow PR agent, working to change my wife’s opinion of these birds. Crows, I insisted, have long gotten a bad rap. They’re true characters, creatures that go against the flow. We should embrace them, celebrate them, not shun them.

I’d greet all the crows we passed, pointing out how mere curiosity moved them to cock their heads to size us up, usually before hopping away with a couple of dismissive caws.

Then came the breakthrough moment: We were recently standing outside a local furniture warehouse when a crow swooped in and landed on the building roof just over our head.

My wife sized up the crow. The crow measured her in return. This time, there was no talk of going home, no mention of a good day spoiled.

“Hello crow,” she said.

It was a truce of sorts. A fresh start.

On that day the crows circled over our balcony, I concluded that the birds weren’t necessarily at war.

Crows live in tight social groups with clear hierarchies and long-term bonds. While they do sometimes fight over food or hierarchy, this restless gathering didn’t necessarily represent any dispute.

Rather, it might have been a sort of crow town-meeting or a response to a nearby predator — a coyote or even a raptor. It could have even been some choreographed courtship rite.

It was like trying to guess the purpose of a gathering of strangers: Was it a protest or mere backyard barbecue? Forming a collective doesn’t necessarily mean trouble.

Maybe I’ll ask the next crow I encounter in my travels.

Meanwhile, as suddenly as it started, the cawing convention dissipated and the blackened skies returned to a lustrous summertime blue, as rich as a crow’s plumage.