Click HERE
for what does the crow say
Conventional
folklore has it that when a crow looks at you and caws three times, that someone
close to you has died and that the crow has come to tell you the bad news. There is a nesting pair of crows near my
house, and if that was true, then I wouldn’t have any family left! So, what does it mean when a crow caws three
times?
Caw...Caw...Caw...
American crows, Corvus
brachyrhynchos, are very smart, are occasional tool users1,
and have a complex social structure, with research showing
that they use analogical reasoning and can recognize faces of individual humans.
So,
do crows’ caws mean anything? The short
answer is yes, according to Douglas Wacker, a researcher at the University of Washington
at Bothell, who noted that crows “wouldn’t take the time or spend the energy
to make all of these vocalizations unless they serve some purpose”.2 Crows make caws, rattles, croaks, clicks,
honks, coos, and other sounds, the thing is that crows vocal ranges and
repertoire of calls are so complex, that no one knows really knows what they
are saying. While crows’ calls are subtle
and varied, there are two main types of calls, contextual calls with the crow
responding to something in its environment, and non-contextual, with calls that
don’t seem to be triggered by an event happening in the crows’ environment.
In
fact, according to Kevin McGowan, a Crow researcher of the Cornell Laboratory
of Ornithology, “Crows may be more complex communicators than other birds”. In fact, according to McGowan, crow is more
like Mandarin or Vietnamese, which are very complex tonal languages, where the
same “word” can be used to mean different things, depending on the tone
and how it’s used.3 So, a crow can use “caw”
to mean different things, depending on the volume, the tone, and the number and
the speed of the “caws”.
But what
does it mean?
According to McGowan, “There’s
a call they give that says, ‘heads up everybody, there’s a hawk’. But they can also indicate ‘it’s
getting closer, now we better hide’. It’s
the same word, but they speed up, ‘cawcawcaw’. Finally, they change into a very different
vocalization, which means ‘hide’. He added, “There’s a lot in crow-speak that
has to do with the timing of the notes, the space between them, and how quickly
they are uttered”. It would be like human-created
music as language, where someone playing the same notes on a piano very softly
(pianissimo), has a different meaning than someone playing the same the notes on
the same piano very forcefully (fortissimo), the notes are the same, but the delivery
and message are quite different.4
The
most common crow calls are non-contextual companion or contact calls. A companion call is an unhurried and relaxed
series of one to ten “caws”, followed by a silence during which the crow
is listening for a response. This is
followed by another burst of “caws” and more silence. These calls don’t seem to be triggered by
anything specific in the crows’ world. It
is just the crow’s way of saying “I am here, this is my territory, this pot
is taken, the coast is clear, nothing exciting happening here, everything is
fine here”!5
So,
a “caw...caw...caw...” is just the crow’s way of saying hello.
I
hope that you continue to enjoy The Woodsman’s Journal Online and look for me
on YouTube at BandanaMan Productions for other related videos, HERE. Don’t forget to follow me on both The
Woodsman’s Journal Online, HERE,
and subscribe to BandanaMan Productions on YouTube. If you have questions, as always, feel free
to leave a comment on either site. I
announce new articles on Facebook at Eric Reynolds, on Instagram at
bandanamanaproductions, and on VK at Eric Reynolds, so watch for me.
That
is all for now, and as always, until next time, Happy Trails!
Notes
1 “American
crows that excel at tool use activate neural circuits distinct from less
talented individuals”, by Pendergraft et. al.
2 “Can
Crows Talk? And If So, What Are They Saying?”, by A. Fonté,
3 “Crow
communication is complicated”, by Joe Rankin,
4
Ibid.
5 “Can
Crows Talk? And If So, What Are They Saying?”, by A. Fonté,
Sources
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accessed April 13, 2024
Pendergraft,
LomaJohn T., Marzluff, John M., Shimizu, Toru, and Templeton, Christopher N.; “American
crows that excel at tool use activate neural circuits distinct from less
talented individuals”, October 3, 2023, [Nature Communications, (2023) 14:6539],
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10589215/#:~:text=Individual%20variation%20in%20the%20ability,that%20favor%20adopting%20tool%20use,
accessed April 13, 2024
Rankin,
Joe; “Crow communication is complicated”, [©2024 www.burlingtonfreepress.com], https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/news/,
accessed
April 13, 2024
Wikimedia, “American
crow, City Park, New Orleans, Louisiana”, April 11, 2018, Melissa McMasters, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:American_crow_(40896666114).jpg,
accessed April 13, 2024
Wikimedia, “American Crow
(Corvus brachyrhynchos) in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada”, July 28, 2019, Ryan
Hodnett, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:American_Crow_(Corvus_brachyrhynchos)_-_Kitchener,_Ontario_2019-07-28.jpg,
accessed April 13, 2024
Wikimedia, “FIELD
MARKS-black,iridescent plumage overall long,heavy,black bill brown eyes black
legs and feet”, May 3, 2012, cuatrok77, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AMERICAN_CROW_(6997589886).jpg,
accessed April 13, 2024
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