I can barely tell them apart. Can they?
This bird, while a big’un, looks by the tail feathers to be a crow.
My northern Ontario town of Thessalon contains a lot of large, shouty, glossy-black birds. On winter birding walks (often as cold as -30C), they can be the only super-active fliers, and depending on whether I’m hearing croaking or cawing, I get either a warning or a mocking vibe from them. I have guessed (and my Merlin birdcall app confirms) that the croakers are Common Ravens (Corvus corax) and the cawers are American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos). You can check out the difference in their calls at the Cornell Lab taxonomy page on Corvidae.
I know they’re Corvids, and that with both of them belonging to the genus Corvus they are closer to each other, family-wise, than they are to other Corvidae such as the Blue Jay (also often encountered on extremely cold days on Lake Huron’s north shore). I find crows and ravens so bafflingly similar, in fact, I generally don’t make an ID until they open those formidable black beaks and speak to me. “Ah, the portentous croak of the raven,” I’m wont to say (no… I’m not wont to say that… that’s pretentious).
I made note of my confusion the other day on social media, and a northern neighbour helpfully weighed in. Author and artist, Elizabeth Creith, who I’m guessing has drawn and/or painted her share of Corvids, wrote:
Ravens have heavier beaks, with a more pronounced curve on the top. Longer beard bristles and throat feathers - the neck looks shaggier. Ravens are often in pairs, crows in larger groups. Ravens have wedge-shaped tails (longer feathers in the centre) and crows' tails are fan-shaped.
Met this honkin’ big raven at a truck stop (above the French River).
So now I will watch for the longer centre feathers in flight, and be more aware of numbers and beaks. Thanks Elizabeth.
I used to be super lazy with these IDs, and just assumed that if I saw a black bird south of Ontario’s French River, it was a crow, and any large black flier above the French River would be a raven. I have it in my head that ravens prefer the north, perhaps because of my wanderings around Whitehorse, Yukon years ago, and encounters there with massive, croaky ravens unlike anything I’ve seen or heard since. Ravens… husky, hardy wilderness-dwellers, picking at roadkill between stands of dense boreal forest; crows… sophisticated urbanites, making fun of humans for leaving so much good, tasty garbage lying about.
But another friend on the socials, Joyce Byrne, let me know the ravens have come (or come back) to Toronto:
We have ravens in Parkdale now, which is pretty amazing. I used to see them down in Liberty Village too, I think it may be the same bird(s). I'm obsessed with corvids so I spot them and get all excited. When I did some research about urban corvids I found out that the population in Toronto was really decimated by SARS in the 2000s. (And that there haven't been ravens in several decades). But I guess the bigger birds are moving their hunting south. Maybe all the garbage strikes have had a positive environmental impact.
Do Corvids like garbage? It seems likely.
Thanks Joyce. I was very intrigued by your factoid about SARS, given that you and I were both working in the magazine business when SARS ripped through Toronto in 2003. Rough times. I note as well in this posting from the Toronto Ornithological Club, that the West Nile Virus outbreak a decade earlier than SARS took out a lot of southern Ontario crows as well.
So, okay, to the careful observer, crows and ravens are fairly easily distinguished from each other, and the old north/south rule-of-thumb no longer applies. But all that still leaves me hesitant to say with any authority what that big black bird is over there.
And this got me wondering… can crows and ravens tell the difference between ravens and crows?
I mean, the populations seem to co-exist very well in Thessalon. You don’t see a lot of Corvid rumbles on Main Street, and everybody seems to get the refuse and roadkill they need. You’ll see both birds in the Tim Hortons parking lot of a breakfast-time, with a real “Mornin’ Ralph; Mornin’ Sam” feel to the whole interaction.
Do these birds know they are completely different species? Are they aware they’re actually pretty far apart on the hereditary charts? Do they ever… you know… make a pretty big mistake, species-wise, and create little ravenows… cute little cravens?
Somebody call a scientist!
Enter Dr. Kaeli Swift, visiting lecturer at the University of Washington (Go Huskies!), who has written a fascinating contemplation of just this question, using actual science and proper terminology. Can crows and ravens hybridize? proves once again that I am a very lazy observer of birds, because while I see peaceful co-existence in my town’s Corvids, crows and ravens do actually spat quite a bit. As Dr. Swift puts it, “come breeding time, crows will be most anxious to evict ravens, not bed them.” This is because ravens have a nasty habit of feeding on crow eggs. Oh, Nature!
On the other hand, we learn from Dr. Swift that crow/raven procreation, while very unlikely, is not impossible. In fact, a crow/raven pairing was closely observed in… drumroll, Joyce Byrne… Toronto, Canada in the early 1990s. Did the Torontonian raven and crow sense how endangered they were from airborne and pest-carried viruses, and so reach out desperately across the species-divide to ward off elimination? I’m no bird scientist, but I like a good romance.
So, yes, that’s exactly what happened.
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A crow … almost at the very top of a tree.
Bonus for blog readers who made it this far.
My love and fascination for Corvids in particular is longstanding. Here is a poem from my collection Killing Things, published in 2002 (Pedlar Press).
