A murder of crows

A murder is a group of crows. Here's a fact: crows are more intelligent than they need to be to survive. How do they use that extra brain space? For starters, crows are always figuring things out. They mate for life and teach their young for up to five years (we know that takes mental effort.) Whether you love or hate them, crows are considered among the most intelligent creatures on earth and can even recognize individual faces.

Last fall PBS ran a Nature series called A Murder of Crows. It described an experiment at the University of Washington where researchers walked around the crow-infested campus wearing realistic Halloween masks. One was Dick Cheney! The "bad" man would approach the bird's nests and mess with the eggs, which drove the parents into fits. They never forgot that face and spread the word, so the person in the mask was dive-bombed everywhere. Not only that, after the babies hatched the parents taught them to hate the scary man.

We have a murder of crows in our neighborhood, but they like me. I don't look like Dick Cheney and I throw crusts of bread and stale crackers out the kitchen door. They're cautiously tame, and sit on the fence looking in the window when I'm cooking or eating a sandwich. Even if there's not a bird in sight, a crow will appear within 30 seconds if I throw something edible on the ground. It's fun to stand outside and time this. Our house is under constant crow surveillance.