Crows (8 page)

By human standards, crows don’t live for long: the oldest wild bird on record died at age fourteen, and most are lucky to make it past their seventh birthday. But within that brief compass, they pack in life histories full of adventure and unexpected twists. For instance, McGowan remembers a young female that he marked as a nestling in Ithaca who was later sighted at a bird-feeding station 10 miles out of town. By the following week, she was back in her natal territory, helping her parents, and she stayed with them through that breeding season. The next summer, however, she flew back out to the country, where she mated and settled down before dying the following year.

“I can’t help but think that she noticed her male while she was out exploring,” McGowan says, “thought, ‘Hey, that guy’s cute,’ and then came back later to see if his female had died. Lo and behold, he was available, and there you have it.”

And lest anyone is discombobulated by this attribution of human thoughts and motivation to a bird, McGowan is happy to admit that he
doesn’t know how crows make their decisions. But do they go prospecting for opportunities? Meet other individuals? Remember the crows and places they’ve been? Do they consult these memories when making decisions about where to live and with whom? Without doubt, they do. If the behavior of crows and humans sometimes invites similar descriptions, it is not necessarily a sign of anthropomorphism, McGowan insists, but of fundamental similarities between two intensely social animals.

This is a conclusion that Carolee Caffrey seconds with enthusiasm. She has, however, noticed one important difference between crows and us: their families are generally more peaceful than ours sometimes are. No matter what the provocation, family members usually work out their differences without violence or any other signs of overt aggression. For instance, in 2001, near the campus of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, there lived a family of crows that included a breeding male and female, their two-year-old son, his two year-old brothers, and a one-year-old sister. The breeding female died that summer, and, by fall, a new female had turned up to take her place. Life went on without incident until it was time to breed, when both the father crow, known as XT from the markings on his tags, and the oldest son, NK, began to court the female. One day XT would be sitting right beside her, preening and being preened, and the next time it would be NK who was billing and cooing. This went on for two whole weeks, without any sign of strife. Then one morning, XT was gone, and that very afternoon, NK and the female,
now his new mate, started to build a nest together.

A week passed, and XT was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, the family on the neighboring territory was experiencing troubles of its own. First, a one-year-old daughter, the only helper, was killed by a great horned owl; then the breeding male was struck by a car. The only survivor, the mother, was left with a nest full of young and no one to help her care for them. Days passed, and the female beat back and forth, carrying food to the nest. Then suddenly, there was XT again, on the roof beside the tree, right in the heart of the widowed bird’s territory. That in itself was unusual, since crows usually stay out of each other’s domains, but what happened next was downright astonishing. With a casual flick of his wings, XT drifted down to the nest and tenderly placed food in the mouth of one of the orphaned young.

➣
A carrion crow, as pictured by Rev. F.O. Morris in his
A History of British Birds,
1851.

According to classical evolutionary theory, XT’s act of apparent kindness should never have happened. If the purpose of life, crudely stated, is to ensure the survival of one’s own genes, then it is a mistake to help raise anyone except your brothers and sisters or, better yet, your own progeny. The neighbor’s chicks, so far as anyone knows, were not related to XT. Could it be that,
having been eased out of his own territory by his upstart son, he decided to help the widow next door as a part of a long-term plan to reestablish himself as a breeding bird? If so, his strategy was successful, for he and his new female bred together the following year and raised a brood of three before his disappearance and probable death late in the summer. Such are the subtleties of crow society.

The American crow, as its name suggests, is restricted to the New World, but a very similar corvid spreads its wings across Europe and Asia. The carrion crow is one of the most widespread and, in some localities, abundant birds in the world, with a range that extends through half a dozen subspecific variations from the North Sea south to the Mediterranean and from Ireland east to China and Japan. Until recently, the birding community thought it had the species pegged as a noncooperative breeder, with no capacity for the complexities of helping. But this certainty was disrupted in 1995 with the discovery of a population of carrion crows in the province of León in northern Spain, in which 75 percent of the territories are occupied by cooperative family groups. “It is such a striking pattern, so easy to see, that I was very surprised that nobody had noticed it,” says researcher Vittorio Baglione, who made the find with collaborators from Sweden, Italy, and Spain. “It is almost impossible to see just two crows flying around together. There are almost always more.” The largest group on record had nine members.