Murder-ous Evolution

Just when you thought it was safe to stop thinking about crows, I’m back with more thoughts on crows. (It’s also blindingly obvious I have a predilection for McDonald’s, but that’s a tangential subject I won’t go into here.) On the cold winter day of this particular crow behavior observation, the wind was blowing a strong, steady breeze with intermittent ferocious gusts, aka the “Cascadia Gap wind”, which is our PNW version of Southern California’s Santa Ana. It bent the flexible tops of tall pines over at a moderate angle and whipped the leaf-bare branches of deciduous trees into a semi-frenzy.

Anyway, as I was sitting in the McDonald’s drive-through lane hoping breakfast was still being served, I noticed a large flock of several dozen crows taking flight from the dairy farm pasture across the highway. Such a large group in the air at midday was unusual, since crows normally flock when heading to their communal roosts at the end of the day. As I watched this curiosity, I thought at first something had alarmed them and they were fleeing a communal threat. However, the flock rapidly separated into scattered pods of several individuals each, and then divided again into smaller groups of two or three. Finally, it appeared all the flock members were essentially flying solo. All of them were flying against the wind, and at first it seemed they were struggling to stay aloft. I was absorbed by the view of the broad expanse of small, black bodies showing against the slate gray sky, seemingly trying to escape a predator.

Not so. I realized these crows were playing, chasing each other back and forth, swooping and swerving on the breeze. It looked like they were playing a manic game of tag. I was reminded of a time I watched a single crow as it flew up vertically, flipped end over end and folded its wings flat to its body, then dropped headfirst straight down at tremendous speed. At the last minute it snapped its wings out and sharply swooped back up into the sky. I could have been watching an antique “barn burner” bi-plane at an iconic 1940s air show. The crow lazily did a few loops back and forth, then did the drop-and-snap maneuver a couple more times before flying off into the distance.

You might think, “So what, most animals play in some form.” That’s certainly true of mammals, but not so much for birds. Dolphins are known for their playfulness and their intelligence has been well documented; the same is true for apes and elephants. There has been much thought given in sci-fi writings to which animals would be in a prime position to advance evolutionarily to become the dominant Planet Earth species. The list of contenders is long, but it seems to me that when you add such well-defined play to all the other things crows can do, they come out way ahead in general intelligence. Given that scientific consensus tells us birds evolved from dinosaurs, specifically therapods – T-Rex and velociraptors – it’s evident crows have a pretty tough family tree. What if their continued evolution brought them to the head of the intelligence queue?

Forget about cockroaches – my evolutionary bet is on crows.