Bird Profile

American Crow

Crows are the smartest birds most people will ever host and the ones most likely to clear a tray in ninety seconds. Both things are true at once, and both are manageable.

The American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) is a large, entirely black bird with a heavy straight bill, a fan-shaped tail and a flat, deliberate wingbeat. It lives almost everywhere people have altered the landscape: farm fields, town parks, playing fields, parking lots, campus lawns, landfills and quiet suburban streets.

Crows are among the most studied birds in North America, and the research keeps producing results that sound made up. They recognize individual human faces, hold grudges, use tools in captivity, pass information between generations, and live in family groups where grown offspring stay home for years to help raise their younger siblings.

They are also the reason a lot of people search for bird information in the first place. Roughly half the questions about crows are some version of how do I get them to come, and the other half are some version of how do I stop them emptying the tray before the cardinals arrive. This page covers both, along with the two things that most confuse crow watchers: telling an American Crow from a Fish Crow, and understanding what West Nile virus did to the population after 1999.

How to identify an American Crow#

Everything about a crow is black, including the bill, legs and eyes. In strong sun the plumage shows a faint purple or blue gloss. The tail is short and rounded or squared at the tip, spread into a fan when the bird banks. The bill is heavy and fairly straight, with bristly feathers over the base of the upper mandible.

The flight is the most useful field mark at a distance. A crow rows along on steady, even flaps with almost no gliding, holding a level line. It rarely soars for long. A raven, by contrast, soars readily, tips side to side, and shows a wedge-shaped tail that comes to a point in the middle.

Grackles and starlings are the two birds most often called crows by people who have not seen a real one nearby. If the bird is standing on your platform feeder eating sunflower seed and is not much larger than a robin, it is a Common Grackle or a European Starling, not a crow. A crow next to a robin looks like a different order of animal.

One taxonomic note worth knowing: the Northwestern Crow of the Pacific coast was merged into the American Crow in 2020 after genetic work showed extensive interbreeding. Older field guides that split them are out of date.

American Crow or Fish Crow? Listen, do not look#

In the eastern half of the continent, along the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain and up the big river valleys, two crow species overlap. They cannot be told apart by plumage in the field, and the size difference is not usable unless the birds are side by side. Voice is the answer, and it is close to foolproof.

• American Crow: a clear, full caw, often repeated in a series of three or four. It carries a long way and sounds like the crow of cartoons.
• Fish Crow: a short, flat, nasal uh-uh, as if the bird has a head cold, often given as a doubled note. A single nasal nyah is also typical.
• Begging young American Crows in late summer give a higher, nasal call that fools many people into reporting Fish Crows out of range. If it is July and the bird sounds whiny, suspect a young American Crow.

Fish Crows have been expanding inland and north along river systems for decades, so range maps age badly. If you are in the eastern half of the country and hear a nasal crow, it is worth reporting to eBird, because inland records help track that spread.

Where crows live and how they use your neighborhood#

American Crows are found across most of the United States and southern Canada. They are resident through much of that range, but northern populations move south in winter, which is why crow numbers in the northern tier swell from October onward even though your local pair never left.

A crow family holds a nesting territory in spring and summer, often the same few blocks year after year. In fall and winter the pattern flips: birds spend the day foraging over a wide area, sometimes 10 to 30 miles (16 to 48 km) from where they sleep, then converge on a communal roost at dusk.

This is why crow presence in a yard is so uneven. You may have four crows every morning in June and forty in January, and neither number tells you anything about your feeder.

What crows eat#

Crows are true omnivores. Their diet includes waste grain, corn, seeds, fruit, insects (especially grasshoppers, beetles and caterpillars), earthworms, small vertebrates, eggs and nestlings, carrion, garbage, and anything a person drops in a parking lot.

The nest predation part of that list drives a lot of crow hatred. It is real: crows take eggs and nestlings of other birds, and they are efficient about it. It is also a small share of the diet and a normal part of an intact food web. If songbirds in your yard are struggling, the far more likely culprits are outdoor cats, window collisions and habitat loss, in roughly that order.

At feeders, crows take whole peanuts with more enthusiasm than anything else, followed by cracked corn, suet, and any meat or fat scraps left out. They are not seed specialists and generally ignore nyjer and small millet-heavy mixes.

Crows at the feeder, and how to stop them dominating it#

Crows cannot perch on a tube feeder, cannot fit through a caged feeder, and struggle with most hanging suet cages. Everything they take from you comes from one of three places: an open tray, the ground under your feeders, or food you left out that was never meant for birds.

That makes the problem unusually tractable. You are not trying to outsmart a crow, which is a losing game. You are removing the three surfaces it can use.

1. Move the main seed to feeders crows physically cannot work: a tube feeder with short perches, or a caged feeder with a mesh grid around 1.5 inches (4 cm).
2. Take the open platform feeder out of service for two weeks, or fit it with a wire cage top. Crows need a large flat landing surface, and two weeks without one usually breaks the routine.
3. Clean up the spill. Ground seed is the single biggest crow magnet in a normal yard. Use a seed catcher tray or switch to a no-mess blend so there is nothing to sweep.
4. Remove non-bird food: pet bowls left outside, unsecured trash, fallen fruit, compost with kitchen scraps. See what not to feed birds for why scraps cause more problems than they solve.
5. If you still want crows, feed them deliberately in one place far from everything else. Whole peanuts on a lawn 60 feet (18 m) away, once a day, at the same time.

The same ground seed that draws crows draws mice and rats, deer and, in some regions, Wild Turkeys. Cleaning up spill solves several problems at once.

Winter roosts#

From fall into late winter, crows gather at night in communal roosts. Small roosts hold a few hundred birds. Large, long-established roosts in cities and towns hold many thousands, and a handful of famous ones run far higher than that. Birds stream in along predictable flight lines in the last hour of daylight, often staging in smaller groups on the way.

Why they do it is not fully settled. Warmth, safety in numbers from Great Horned Owls, and information sharing about food sources are all plausible and probably all contribute. The evidence for the information-sharing part is suggestive rather than conclusive.

Roosts in urban areas cause real conflict over noise and droppings. Municipal responses that work are non-lethal and persistent: lasers, recorded distress calls and pyrotechnics used repeatedly over several weeks to move birds to a less sensitive site. One-off attempts fail, and shooting into a roost simply scatters the problem across more neighborhoods.

West Nile virus and what it did to crows#

West Nile virus arrived in North America in 1999 and reached most of the continent within about five years. Corvids proved unusually susceptible, and American Crows more than almost anything else. Infected crows die at very high rates, which is why dead-crow reports became an early warning system for public health agencies tracking the virus.

The population effect was visible. Crow numbers fell sharply in affected regions in the early 2000s, and Blue Jays, magpies and other corvids declined too. Populations in most areas have since recovered substantially, though the recovery has not been uniform everywhere.

For a backyard, the practical consequence is small but real. Do not handle dead crows with bare hands, and report clusters of dead birds to your state wildlife or health agency if they ask for such reports. Ordinary feeder hygiene, as covered in cleaning schedules, is aimed at diseases spread bird to bird rather than at a mosquito-borne virus, but it remains worth doing.

Nesting and family life#

Crows build a bulky stick nest, usually 15 to 60 feet (5 to 18 m) up in a tree, lined with bark strips, grass, moss and hair. Clutches are typically 3 to 6 pale blue-green eggs blotched with brown. Incubation runs around 16 to 18 days and young leave the nest at roughly 4 to 5 weeks.

The unusual part is the helpers. Young crows commonly stay with their parents for several years and help feed the next brood, defend the territory and mob predators. A group of five crows in your yard in June is far more likely to be one family than five unrelated birds.

Fledgling crows spend a long, clumsy period on the ground in late spring. They look abandoned and are not. Leave one alone and keep cats indoors.

Living with crows#

• Decide which side you are on and set the yard up accordingly. Half measures give you crows and frustration.
• If you want them: whole peanuts on open ground, one feeding a day, well away from the songbird station and away from windows.
• If you do not: no open tray, no ground spill, no pet food outside, and a caged or tube feeder as the main station.
• Learn the alarm behavior. Crows mobbing something in a tree usually means a hawk or an owl, and it is often how you find the hawk hunting your feeder.
• Accept the seasonal swing. Big winter numbers and small summer numbers are normal and have nothing to do with what you are offering.