Free Crows by Candace Savage

true of territorial invasions; the more serious or the more prolonged the threat, the louder and more frantic the vocalizations.
    But although these statistics tell us that the birds are probably feeling something, they cannot tell us what those feelings are. Here our best and only guide is intuition. In his 1989 book Ravens in Winter, Bernd Heinrich reflects on the unexpected emotional rapport he often senses with his black-winged research subjects.“It surprises me,” he writes,“that many of the ravens’ calls… display emotions that I, as a mammal for whom they are not intended, can feel.” When two ravens are tucked up intimately together, they make cooing sounds that sound tender to his ear. When they are in a situation that would
make him angry, their deep, rasping complaints seem to express anger. In addition, Heinrich believes that he can sense a wide range of other emotions from a raven’s voice and body language, including surprise, happiness, distress, bravado, and braggadocio. “Emotions are more ‘primitive’ than reason,” Heinrich notes, “and I presume that many animals have very similar emotions to our own.” But the emotional symmetry between corvids and humans is something special.
    Kevin McGowan, the crow man of Ithaca, New York, has no doubt that the birds in his studies have feelings, some of which are directed at him. Many of the crows in the city hate him. In particular, he remembers a young male helper crow that he banded on the campus of Cornell University, in a territory that was used by thousands of people every day. The crow would watch the crowds come and go without fury or fuss, but when McGowan showed up under the nest with his binoculars once every three or four months, the crow would raise a ruckus.“He would pick me out from all those people and start yelling and following me around.” Thinking that maybe the binoculars were the giveaway, McGowan suited up a friend and sent him out instead, but the crow completely ignored him.
    When his study was most active, McGowan gained such a bad “rep” that he couldn’t go anywhere in the city without arousing a storm of resentment. “Everybody would join in,” he recalls. “I’ve had as many as seventy-five crows after me at once.” As he extended his research onto territories he had never visited, he discovered that the local crows had often been forewarned. “Some of these guys knew me—they’d start to object the minute I showed up—even though I had never knowingly met them.” In the end, he got so tired of playing the bad guy that he started to throw peanuts to the crows he met, “in the hope of making a few friends.”

    ➣ The harsh calls of a northwestern crow rip through the bright air.

    EMOTIONS aremore
“PRIMITIVE”
than REASON, and I presume
that many animals have very
similar emotions to our OWN.
BERND HEINRICH

ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS
    Carolee Caffrey has a lifetime of crow stories. There was the time she was watching two crows in Encino, California—a year-old male and his father—foraging under a flowering magnolia tree. When the young male’s sister flew in to join them, she accidentally dislodged a petal, which landed beside her brother’s face and made him jump. His sister watched this happen, turned, inched along the branch to a flower, plucked a petal with her beak, and inched back over his head. Then she leaned forward, dropped the petal right beside him, and made him jump again. Was she just being a pesky little sister?
    There have also been more somber moments. In Oklahoma, for example, Caffrey once saw two adult crows, a breeding male and a helper, break away from their group and come back to feed a family member that was terribly injured.“It was sad,” she said, “and so tender.” Another time, she was observing a nest through a spotting scope when the breeding pair returned to feed their nestlings, only to discover that their nest had been raided by a raptor in their absence.