Beyond the fact that they give us early warning of West Nile virus hot spots, should we care that our crows are disappearing? After all, many people consider crows to be nothing more than pests. Admittedly, their personal habits have earned them their share of enemies. Alfred Hitchcock did not feature crows as some of his most menacing Birds for no reason. Some birders frown on crows' penchant for eating the eggs of other songbirds and preying on chicks from other birds' nests. Many farmers hate them for their alleged fondness for corn. They are also associated with death, through their taste for roadkill and garbage. "A lot of people don't like crows because their behavior is not far from a turkey vulture in terms of scavenging. I love them, though, for their intelligence and striking jet-black beauty," says David Johnson, owner of the Wild Bird Center in Fox River Grove.

Crows have another fan in Chicagoan Barb Kirpluk, who fed and tracked four crow families in her Northwest Side neighborhood for several years until they all disappeared last year. "It was heartbreaking because they are so intelligent," she says. "When you look in their eyes, you can see that somebody's in there, especially if they know you." This year, two new crows have arrived in Kirpluk's neighborhood, and she's been using peanuts to introduce herself to them." One day," she says, "they surprised me by sitting right outside my house on the telephone line waiting for their food."

Photo by Rob Curtis, The Early Birder.

The crows' disappearance may also concern the rest of us who don't know any crows personally. For one thing, crows have come to perform a vital function in the 20 or so years they've swarmed into urban areas. To put it simply: they clean the place up. This past spring, the Evanston Health Department reported that dead alewives were piling up on nearby beaches in part because the crows were not around to remove them. Ditto for roadkill and litter, although many other scavengers also help keep those leftovers in check. In addition, crows help control agricultural pests. Despite their reputation as corn lovers, they eat anything that sits still long enough. Farmers this year may find they should have been valuing their crow visitors rather than aiming shotguns at them. In one study, reported by Candace Savage in her book, Bird Brains, a single family of crows ate nearly 40,000 agricultural pests during the nesting season.

The continued absence of crows, which despite their raucous voices are classified as the largest songbird in Illinois, is probably not the boon some birders might expect it to be for other, smaller songbirds. According to Kevin McGowan of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in New York, one of the world's foremost experts on crows, though crows prey on the eggs and young of songbirds, small mammals do so more frequently. Since all of these mammalian predators formerly found their own young attacked by crows, their numbers will likely rise in the crows' absence, increasing songbird predation. Additionally, the decreased crow population will be less able to drive away predatory hawks and owls, opening another potential avenue of predation. However, McGowan continues, since crow populations were at historic highs in urban areas by the 1990s, the decline in their numbers might still relieve pressure on songbird populations.

But there's another reason to value the crow — they put family ahead of everything. "They have one of the most intricate family systems of any bird," notes McGowan. "They're long-lived — 30 years in the wild, possibly up to 50 in captivity — so they don't breed for as long as eight years after birth. Instead they hang around and help out with the 'kids.' Any time you see a group of crows smaller than 15 hanging out in your neighborhood, it's a family." Scientifically, this is called cooperative breeding, in which related juveniles or "auxilliaries" act as babysitters, giving the parents more time to spend searching for food.

McGowan has studied crows intensively for more than 15 years, climbing as high as 120 feet into the treetops to band chicks in the nest. He's been mobbed for his trouble by whole family groups, and often the entire neighborhood of up to 75 crows; but by following these birds, he's discovered that families interact in unexpectedly familiar ways. For instance, parents may give a new mating pair "the back 40" of their territory, just like American pioneer families did in settling Illinois. McGowan has also observed a group of sisters paying visits to each other. And most crows actually commute regularly to and from "work" — feeding areas away from their roost sites.

Photo by J. Schumacher, VIREO.

"Crows are cool because they're just like us!" laughs Carolee Caffrey, science associate with Audubon Science in Pennsylvania and co-author of the "American Crow" monograph in the Birds of North America Account. In fact, a juvenile crow resembles nothing so much as a teenage human: a little bit lazy, in love with a good practical joke, never missing the opportunity to hot-dog. Crows, she points out, don't always fly "as the crow flies." They often engage in such antics as barrel rolls in the wind and racing each other in dive-bombing runs toward the ground, apparently just in fun. Crows even have been observed hanging by one foot upside-down from a wire, apparently showing off for other crows.

Caffrey has personally observed crows apparently playing jokes on each other as well. In one instance, a female crow startled her brother by accident when she dislodged a petal from a branch in a flowering tree. Then she deliberately tossed another petal down on him, seemingly with the sole purpose of seeing him jump again. Such behavior is probably to be expected from a bird with one of the largest cranial capacities of any bird, relative to its body size.

Crows also have extremely acute sight and hearing, as well as a keen sense of opportunity. University of Illinois graduate student Sarah Yaremych, who studied a wild crow population, reports that she captured the same crow five times in her Australian cage trap. "Once he learned he only had to put up with a little handling to eat his fill of doughnuts and Cheetos," she says admiringly, "he was right there."