I have considered it likely that groups of animals, obviously including crows are able to maintain a group memory and also achieve group cognition.
Here is a phenomena that conforms to that suggestion.
Most surely, all this inspired Hitchcocks movie ' the birds'
If You Think You Can Hold a Grudge, Consider the Crow
The brainy birds carry big chips on their shoulders, scientists say. And some people who become subjects of their ire may be victims of mistaken identity.
A murder of crows, which flock, en masse, every evening from across Greater Vancouver to a five-block section of Still Creek, Burnaby, British Columbia. Here they enjoy safety in numbers over the evening and night.Credit...
Photographs by Alana Paterson
Thomas Fuller traveled to Vancouver and Seattle to interview victims of crow attacks, and scientists who study the birds.
Published Oct. 28, 2024Updated Oct. 29, 2024
Over and over, the crows attacked Lisa Joyce as she ran screaming down a Vancouver street.
They dive bombed, landing on her head and taking off again eight times by Ms. Joyce’s count. With hundreds of people gathered outdoors to watch fireworks that July evening, Ms. Joyce wondered why she had been singled out.
“I’m not a fraidy-cat, I’m not generally nervous of wildlife,” said Ms. Joyce, whose crow encounters grew so frequent this past summer that she changed her commute to work to avoid the birds.
“But it was so relentless,” she said, “and quite terrifying.”
Ms. Joyce is far from alone in fearing the wrath of the crow. CrowTrax, a website started eight years ago by Jim O’Leary, a Vancouver resident, has since received more than 8,000 reports of crow attacks in the leafy city, where crows are relatively abundant. And such encounters stretch well beyond the Pacific Northwest.
A Los Angeles resident, Neil Dave, described crows attacking his house, slamming their beaks against his glass door to the point where he was afraid it would shatter. Jim Ru, an artist in Brunswick, Maine, said crows destroyed the wiper blades of dozens of cars in the parking lot of his senior living apartment complex. Nothing seemed to dissuade them.
Attacks by aggrieved crows can become the stuff of horror films, with lives being seemingly transformed into the Hitchcockian nightmare of “The Birds.”
Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.
They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.
Attacks by aggrieved crows can become the stuff of horror films, with lives being seemingly transformed into the Hitchcockian nightmare of “The Birds.”
Gene Carter, a computer specialist in Seattle, was followed by crows that lurked outside his windows for the better part of a year.
“The crows would stare at me in the kitchen,” he said in an interview. “If I got up and moved around the house, they would find any place where they could perch and scream at me. If I walked out to my car they would dive bomb me. They would get within an inch of my head.”
Mr. Carter knows precisely what set off the attacks. One day in his backyard, he saw crows encroaching on a robin’s nest and launched a rake into the air.
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Jim O’Leary, founder of CrowTrax, the crow-attack tracking site.
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CrowTrax, founded eight years ago, has received more than 8,000 reports of crow attacks in Vancouver, where crows are relatively abundant.
But he never imagined that the crows’ revenge would last so long. The mob learned to identify the bus he took on his way home from work, Mr. Carter said. “They were waiting for me at the bus stop every single day,” he said. “My house was three or four blocks away and they would dive bomb me all the way home.”
The harassment stopped only when Mr. Carter moved.
Experts say the majority of crow attacks occur in the spring and early summer, when protective parents are watching over their young and defending their nests from possible encroachers. But in other cases, the reason for an attack is not so clear.
When crows stalked her in July, Ms. Joyce noticed on a local Facebook group that several other women in her neighborhood were also being divebombed — and that they all had long blond hair.
“I wondered if there was a connection,” Ms. Joyce said. “Do they have a beef with a fair-haired person?”
