Common crow. A bird species that some people find ugly, are very easily seen just about anywhere. Common Raven, Australian Raven and Carrion crows are few types of crows that mostly feed on dead animals. That itself sounds a bit yuckky and doesn’t really put Crows in a good light. However in East Asia crows are supposed to symbolize good luck.
It has been found recently that crows are capable of tool construction as well as tool use and they are now among the worlds most intelligent animals with brain size (in proportion to the body size) as large as apes. I can vouch for this information as despite putting up a scare”crow” in our garden, the crows would still land up to collect broken branches and the sticks fallen from the trees and would mess up the smaller plants and seedlings. They would collect these and build up their nest in one of the trees on our garden. I even noticed one of the crows smartly breaking a stick and also trying to sort out a large tangled thick piece of string. Couldn’t really wait to see if it actually managed to do it but I can say it was going in the right direction.
Another bit of strange behavior about crows that I noticed is that they really want to hog the limelight. A few days back, I was trying to capture photos of a Fantail from our window. As soon as I set the focus on the bird, a common crow flew by and, threatened the fantail and shooed it away and sat on the branch, looking at my camera. The first picture of this post is exactly how the crow was looking at me, as if to pose instead of the Fantail.
In our residential colony at Govandi, Maharashtra, a whole community of these noisy creatures, start their day almost as early as 3:00 AM in the morning and go on till 7:30 PM in the evening. There won’t be a single moment in the day when you wouldn’t hear a crow croak loudly near you. Well to me, when I don’t see too many other species of birds around, I can just practice bird photography clicking a few snaps of this easily found common crow species. More Information about Crows.
