Crows, Now & Then

For instance, crows of many species learn to drop nuts and other hard food items like clams from just the right height over just the right hard substrate to break them open. But carrion crows living near a driving school in Japan learned to use cars to do the work for them. These crows wait for traffic to stop at an intersection, fly down and place the nuts in front of the tires of the stopped vehicles, then retrieve the nutmeats from the nuts cracked open when the cars ran over them. Over the last 20 years, this behavior gradually spread beyond the immediate vicinity of the school—and people have begun to help the crows by deliberately running over the nuts on the road!

At different times and in different places, crows have been revered, respected, feared, and reviled. In 15th- and 16th-century England, crows were appreciated and protected because their catholic tastes in food, which include putrid meat and other spoiled food, helped keep the streets clean. Later, however, when crows in numbers feasted on the corpses of Londoners killed in the great fire of 1666, they were viewed with revulsion and bounties were placed on their heads.

- Review of In the Company of Crows and Ravens. John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell by Susan Lumpkin