Welcome to Crow Season. You've Been Underestimating Them.

Welcome to our next installment of a national geographic fueled exploration of wild animals. For the next few weeks we are going to be talking about Crows.

You probably think of them as trash goblins who, like seagulls, are looking to steal your food at every given opportunity. Half eaten? No problem. Still in your hand while you reach for the mustard? Absolutely. Right out of your golf cart? Why not? You’ve seen them everywhere, they’re common in the US, and you absolutely have underestimated them.

A question to consider: Do you think you’re better than crows?

What sets humans apart from the animal kingdom?

Is it the ability to make and use tools? Because Crows do that. You know how the ideal way to open a bag of chips is to pull at the sides so the seam at the top opens up? I’ve seen two crows in the dead of winter up in Wyoming pulling on either side of a bag of chips to open it up just like we do. They craft sticks into hooks to pull prey out of their holes as well.

If the crafting of tools didn’t tip you off … Crows are also known to plan for the future, a capability so rare that it was once thought to only occur in humans.

Maybe it’s the size of our brains. We’ve got big brains. Crows have tiny brains. That makes us better right?

Did you know that Crows have a brain-to-body ratio comparable to great apes? And in case you’re wondering, peptides and a rigorous workout regimen won’t help with your brain-to-body ratio. To quote my son, you get what you get and you don’t get upset.

What about memory? Your memory is clearly going to be better and more functional than a bird’s. Although … crows recognize individual human faces. Not just that it’s human, but that it’s you. My wife used to take the Apple shuttle to work, and after getting off the bus she had to walk a couple blocks to her specific work building.

Three days in a row she found herself being chased and dive-bombed by a crow … which I thought was hilarious when she told me about it. Whether she walked too close to its nest, or did something offensive in the bird world we’ll never know. But get this. That crow now recognizes her. It taught its flock to recognize her. Its offspring.

This one bad interaction made Allison a persona non-grata … a multi-generational, community-wide public enemy number one. This sort of behavior has been proven by research studies.

That was years ago, and I assume every crow we see, even those that are many states away, know my wife on sight.

Crows are incredibly interesting creatures. They store food for hard times, sometimes in hundreds of different places. And most importantly, they remember each and every spot (unlike the tree squirrels, or most of us with our phone or our keys).

They have social intelligence as well. And not the emotional intelligence you and I think about. They’re on the diabolical end of the spectrum. When hiding food, if a crow knows it’s being watched by another crow, it will make “fake caches”, essentially going through the motions of hiding food somewhere without actually hiding anything there.

This isn’t instinctual, this is learned, adapted, and passed down.

Are you still feeling superior to crows?

They’re conducting counter-surveillance and engaging in active deception more skillfully than the CIA.

Scientists noted that when a crow dies, others gather around the body. Initially they thought the birds were mourning their fallen comrade, and while I’m sure some of it was that … the researchers found that it was intelligence gathering. They were learning what killed their friend so they can avoid that threat in the future.

Family groups are multi-generational. Juveniles stay and help their parents raise younger siblings, a behavior called cooperative breeding, which is rare in the animal world.

That’s quite a bird.

This week we won’t pull out any business learnings, but it doesn’t take a great mental leap to see how we can benefit from channeling our inner crow: pay attention, remember everything, and never stop learning.