GoKawiilWhen my family and I visited my sister Annie in California last summer, I was excited to see her new house—but more excited to meet a neighbor she’d told me a lot about. Despite being a frequent visitor, the neighbor didn’t make an appearance at first; maybe he was spooked by my clamorous kids. A couple of days later, though, I came face-to-beak with Sal in a narrow side yard. Looking above the succulents and wildflowers, Sal met my gaze with an air of appraisal so frank that, coming from a person, it would have been rude. Then the glossy black American Crow flew away.
Annie first met Sal in early 2024, soon after she and her partner, Jack, moved into their house. She was removing old landscaping fabric when a crow landed on the fence and looked at her curiously. She pointed to where the lifted tarp had exposed fresh soil and was intrigued when the bird swooped down and grabbed a worm. “It seemed like Sal understood,” she says.
American Crows all look more or less identical to the human eye. But Annie and Jack came to recognize Sal, a bold character with a distinctive hop due to a bad leg, and began offering the bird unsalted peanuts. The treats attracted a second, more timid crow, whose deformed foot also distinguished it. They called Sal’s buddy Pal. Within a few weeks, Annie and Jack were buying peanuts in bulk. Using food as a reward, they trained the two corvids to pay them regular visits.
Or did they? Annie wondered whether, from the crows’ perspective, it might be the other way around.
After all, the humans were also rewarded. When Annie opened the curtains in the morning, she looked forward to seeing the crows swoop down to land on her fence, seemingly greeting her. When she came outside, they might say hello with a swoosh of their wings or perch on a patio chair opposite her as she worked on her laptop. The way Sal and Pal had come to trust her was gratifying, and she felt even more honored by their attention when she learned that the crows had full social calendars; it turned out one neighbor knew Sal as Russell. “Clearly they have so much else going on,” Annie says. “It felt like they had these busy lives that we were fitting into.”
When it comes to corvid–human connections, Annie isn’t the only one who wonders who’s training whom. Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, has developed bonds with many crows at his home and on campus. Such a relationship, he says, “absolutely alters my behavior.” If, for instance, he forgets to bring peanuts for the birds at his university, he takes an alternate route around school. “I’ll find myself sneaking across campus in a tunnel or through buildings,” he says, “because I feel so bad when I run into them.”
Like Bergstrom and my sister, many people form sustained personal connections with their local crows. Those who do often consider the attention of these charismatic corvids a privilege and a source of joy. Some even call the animals their friends. What’s harder to determine, though, is whether the crows return the feeling.
At the most basic level, crows likely view humans who feed them as a means of survival. Our yards may provide a safe place to congregate and forage. A Red-tailed Hawk that might strike in an open field may be more reluctant to swoop onto a small lawn. When people put out treats, it only sweetens the deal.
Sometimes crows will seemingly leave “gifts” for people who feed them, which recipients often view as a thank-you. But these offerings—keys, coins, stones, and, in Bergstrom’s case, possibly a ring his daughter had lost—may have a simpler explanation. Anne B. Clark, a retired Binghamton University behavioral ecologist who studied urban crows, says that in all videos she’s seen of this behavior, the birds were very young. Juveniles frequently carry and play with interesting objects, she says. So a crow may simply be dropping what’s already in its beak to pick up food. “My own opinion is that crows are not terribly interested in us,” Clark says.
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