Crows. How do they know its Wednesday in our neighborhood?

Every week it’s the same thing. The garbage trucks come by early in the morning and then in comes the sound of crows squawking in the trees and perching on telephone poles nearby.

This fascinating bird, gets vilified by many, even two-year-old Makenna has an opinion on crows.

Hi this is Terry VanderHeiden with the Nature Photography Podcast. This week, we are talking about crows.

Many western cultures associate crows with bad omens, disease and even death. Also associated with witches, many people believe crows are responsible for reducing the population of other birds by eating eggs right out of the nest.

If that’s not bad enough reputation, when a group of crows gather together it is called: a MURDER of crows.

In spite of what you may think of crows, these are fascinated birds that are quite intelligent, very plentiful and not really easy to photograph. Let’s learn a little more about crows so that way we can become better wildlife photographers.

The first thing to know about crows is that they are almost everywhere. The crow belongs to the Corvid family of birds, that includes, not surprisingly, its often-confused cousin, the common raven.

They are also related to the magpie and blue jays. Corvids are found everywhere on earth other than the tip of South America and on the polar ice caps.

You won’t however, find too many crows in the desert, as they have a preference for wooded areas and also areas that are created by man. Like city parks, golf courses, and parking structures.

One thing that happens quite often is people mistake crows for ravens and visa versa.

There are a few things that make it easy to tell them apart. The Common Raven is quite a bit larger than the American Crow. Think the size of a red-tailed hawk for the Raven.

The raven also has a wedge-shaped tail, while the crow’s tail is more fan like when its flying overhead. The crow’s tail feathers are basically one length. When the feathers fan out its more of an even spread. The raven however, has longer middle feathers so fanned out it looks more like a wedge.

Also, Crows like to hang out in groups, where the Raven is solitary or at best seen cruising with just one other raven.

The term “murder of crows” came from medieval times, where words were used to describe a group of animals based on perceived qualities. Such as a pride of lions or a flamboyance of flamingos.

The crows, seen scavenging over bodies on the battle field, or often gathered around a dead crow, along with the current superstitions of those times, were fitted with the descriptive name; MURDER of crows.

Crows are very social animals and are frequently seen in groups.

They are also, one animal species that have been known to, conduct funerals.

They can be seen gathered as a group, surrounding a deceased crow.

They seem to be paying their respects to the fallen family member. These birds almost never touch the dead crow, so if you were unconvinced, those actions rule out scavenging.

In fact, what the crows are doing is they are learning about what happened to the dead crow and often they will not return to place where another crow met his demise, even if the food source is plentiful.

Crows are known to mate for life. While the mating pair will often gather in large groups, when it comes to mating season, the same two crows get back together.

The crow’s family order is something to admired. It has been studied that juvenile crows, stick around and help at the family nest. These young birds will stay and protect the nest from predators, bring food back to mom and dad and even help feed their younger siblings in the nest. These juvenile birds don’t just do this for one season, they stick around and help out at the nest for up to five years!

How smart are crows?

Most people think of the term bird brain to illustrate how stupid someone can be. But in the crow’s case the brain is quite large. When you consider the brain to body ratio, the crow’s brain is amazingly large. While coming in at only; point two ounces, the ratio to body weight is 2.7 percent of the entire bird. In contrast, the human brain is only about 1.9 percent in the brain to body ratio.

Only Ravens and Parrots have a larger brain to body ratios.

So clearly, crows are often smarter than some humans.

Researchers have found that the crow’s brain is on par with the great apes. In some circles the crow is called “feathered apes”. Even having more capabilities than the apes when it comes to cognitive reasoning.

Cognitive reasoning is measured by things like sustained attention, speed of information processing, working memory and pattern recognition.

These are really smart birds.

There is a common Aesop’s Fable called; The Crow and the Pitcher.

This story tells of a thirsty crow that comes across a pitcher of water that is just too low to drink. The crow figures out that if it starts dropping pebbles one-by-one, into the pitcher, the water level will slowly rise and enable the crow to quench his thirst.

This was indeed the case. Scientists employed a comparable on test crows. They did a test with a floating worm in a pitcher of water. The crow thought it through and filled the pitcher with pebbles to raise the water level to get at the worm. The test crows also knew enough to be even more effective by bringing larger pebbles to drop into the pitcher to get the task done even quicker.

How clever are these birds? In California, crows have been observed watching traffic signals to help them prepare a meal.

When crows came across some tasty walnuts, they were seen flying down and placing the hard-shelled walnut onto the asphalt of city intersections. Then, they would wait for cars to roll over the nut, crushing it to expose the meaty center.

How did the crows avoid getting run over, you ask? Well, they would watch the lights and only go down to pick up or drop off a nut when the light was red. They’d show patience and wait a complete traffic light cycle and only then pick up their crushed walnuts.

Another cool story about crows is about a study a team from the University of Washington who did some tests on their local crows. The idea was to see how well crows could identify human faces.

The group went out and bought some Halloween masks. One was a caveman mask and another was of, at the time, Vice president Dick Cheney. The idea was that the caveman mask would be the test and the Dick Cheney mask was for control status. So it had nothing to do with political preference.

At five different locations, the caveman masks were worn when trapping and banding some of the wild crows. Crows don’t go for that capturing business.

When they were being released, the crows squawked and scolded the caveman looking human. Even other crows nearby joined in the ruckus cawing and dive bombing the caveman.

Over several years, the masks were worn on casual strolls through those areas and were always greeted with harassing calls and swooping behaviors to the caveman and the Dick Cheney mask was generally ignored, well at least by the crows.

The trapping and tagging of the crows were only done the first few times, so scientists were amazed that the swooping and angry calls continued years later when someone appeared with the caveman mask.

What is really amazing, is that some birds where not even alive when the study started. But they still scolded the mask wearer anyway. The “Attack the mask” was clearly passed on to younger birds and so the grudge was passed on through generations.

A pretty impressive bird indeed.

Crows have also learned to use tools. When faced with extracting food from a hole in a tree, they have been seen finding a twig and using it to extract their next meal. But what is fascinating, is the crows in research test, had learned to manufacture a hook at the end of the twig to work as a BETTER tool.

Now that you know more about these amazing birds, it’s time to talk about how to photograph them.

As with all wildlife targets, you have to go find the crows. One of the easiest ways to find crows is to just listen. They have a very distinctive sound.

Start with going to your nearest public park. Since crows are opportunistic feeders, they have learned that humans can provide quick and easy meals.

I recently witnessed a crow event at a Target parking lot. Someone dropped a bag of Doritos in the parking lot and pigeons were standing around it looking at, befuddled by this sealed bag. It looked interesting, might have smelled like food but there was nothing the pigeons could do.

Not long after, a crow swooped down, the pigeons gave the crow a wide birth and watched the crow open the bag and take a chip back it’s nearby nest. With crow gone, the pigeons were greedily scarfing up Dorito chips. That was up until the crow came back for a second helping when the pigeons spread out and waited their turn, once again.

Just about anywhere is good crow habitat.

Since there are many opportunities for viewing crows in action, you can begin your quest simply by listening. The repetitive “caw caw” sound is distinctive and it is the best place to start.

Next, consider their food source. Crows will eat just about anything from discarded human food, to insects to small animals, aquatic animals, to just about any dead creature.

While consuming carrion is traditionally thought of as vulture’s domain, crows seldom want to miss out on an easy meal.

As with any wildlife photography, start by watching the behaviors of the crow. He might have found some tasty food on the side of the road, you pull up and give him some comfort space to have his meal.

He might start on one limb of a tree and hop to another branch, down to the ground and over to the food source. Watch him a few times and see that a pattern will develop.

Using a long lens, focus on one of the spots that you know is part of his pattern. And wait.

There is an obvious problem with photographing crows. First and foremost is that they are all black. A totally black bird can really mess with your exposures. My suggestion is to shoot in manual mode. This will ensure that you’re in-camera meter will not see all that black of the bird’s feathers and try to adjust the exposure to make the bird medium gray.

The best way that I have found to do this is once you are in your preferred photo spot, shoot some test shots on aperture priority mode. Get the scene the way you like it as you look at the back of your camera.

Note that exposure, as that is your starting point exposure.

Switch the camera to manual mode and plug in the exposure you just determined. Take some test shots to confirm you did it right. Now increase the exposure one stop.

Lets say you started with f/8 at 4000th of a second, boosting it one stop will be, in this scenario, f/5.6 at 4000th of a second. This shot should be lighter over all. This is likely all you will need to compensate for the extreme darkness of the crow.

Next consider your background. With a dark bird against, say against a light background, the contrast may not be pleasing to the eye. If you have the opportunity, try shifting your position to get a much darker background. That way, when you lighten everything up with the boost of exposure, you will be lightening up an already dark background.

Try, if can, to get to eye level or slightly below the crow’s eye line. This is a good rule of thumb with all wildlife photography but especially important with your bird photography. Eye level or slightly below, might mean you are on your belly in the dirt, but it will be worth it.

Enjoy capturing this much maligned bird. They are pretty easy to find, but you will find it to be a big challenge to getting a good shot of them. That’s because they are very smart and don’t want to put themselves in any perceived danger posing for you.

I would like to thank all of you who have been listening over the past season. The Nature Photography Podcast has thousands of downloads and is climbing in the charts and is now being listened to in almost every state in the US and it’s being listened to in over 30 countries. So, thank you for that.

I would like to ask a favor you if you are enjoying these episodes. Take a minute and tell another outdoor photographer about it. Maybe make a quick post on your Instagram or Facebook page. It would help a lot in getting people to discover this podcast. It can easily be found by typing in THE Nature Photography Podcast. For some reason the THE in the beginning is important.

Another way to help spread the word is to leave a positive review on the site where you get you podcasts, apple podcasts, Spotify etc.

As always, you can contact me with questions or suggestions for future podcasts, I answer all my email. Just send it to; Terry@imagelight.com – that is spelled: T-e-r-r-y AT I-M-A-G-E-L-I-G-H-T dot com

Until next time, this is Terry VanderHeiden with The Nature Photography Podcast.