To feed the crows?

[BettyWhittaker]

Anyone know anything about 🐦‍⬛?

Last year I fell down a rabbit hole regarding crows - funnily enough it happened after reading a thread on here about their behaviour and intelligence.

I decided to start an experiment to determine how long it would take a group of crows to remember my face and start to trust me. So I started feeding a group of crows on the park behind my house. At first, only one crow would hang around but it stayed far away and would only come down for the food when I was safely away from it. Before long another crow turned up. So for months I was feeding two crows who kept their distance but seemed to recognise me. Eventually these two crows started waiting for me at the entrance to the park and if they weren’t there when I turned up - they showed up shortly afterwards. They were now getting a little closer too.

Fast forward to yesterday … 4 crows showed up 😂 I fed them all and they appeared to be following me at a distance.

Today - 4 crows all sat around waiting when I approached the park. As soon as I got in there they all flew closer and started positioning themselves on the ground around me - staring directly at me - watching my hands and getting quite close to me. I carried on walking and kept hearing funny little noises behind me and when I turned around - there they were - following closely behind. I fed them again and carried on walking only to see crows shooting past me and landing in front of me - staring at me. A little unnerved now I fed them again and carried on walking … this behaviour continued until suddenly it was like I’d crossed an invisible barrier that they all stayed behind as I walked away.

Fascinating - they even seem to have memorised my route as once they stopped following they all met up in an area where I need to walk past on my way out.

Am I doing anything wrong here? Are locals likely to complain? Will they start bothering other people and will they suddenly turn on me and attack me for my bird food? 😂

This is my goal for 2026! Befriend the crows.

Crows before bros and all that.

I'm surprised you fell down a rabbit hole and found crows. I think it was a crow hole.

I'm trying to get my crows to mimic me, I feed them when I walk my dog, they follow us around and every time I throw a handful of peanuts & kibble I say 'morning crows'. My dream is that they'll start saying it back.

I feed the crows in my local park and they follow me every time I walk through. They're getting braver and a couple of them will sit within a metre of me, but we're not yet at the 'full trust' level I'd like to be.
My dream is to walk through the park with one riding on my shoulder.

Crows are extremely intelligent but they are also a huge predator of songbirds and eggs. They are amazing animals and are one of the apex avian predators in the UK. They do not need feeding by humans. My neighbour started feeding them and we went from 1 pair, to over 40 crows in 2 weeks. They all started nesting around and we lost all the song birds, swifts and ground birds (we are rural Yorkshire). It took a lot of 'scaring' to get rid of them and restore a natural balance of birds.

Funny thing is I used to have a huge phobia of birds which only really went away when I started learning about crows.

Have you ever heard them speak?? They sound human! I never knew crows could speak sometimes better than parrots. I watch one guy who rescued an injured baby crow once and it refused to leave when he released it so he kept it as a pet - it talks like a human and goes for walks with him on his shoulder - no restrictions - its free to fly away at any point but it chooses not to. It really is amazing

Love this

Love it but watch out OP: do you know what the collective noun for crows is…

I like to feed the wildlife. There are a lot of magpies round our way. Unfortunately my cat finds magpies very tasty 😋
I generally go down to the local park with food scraps and feed the ducks, geese and the swans. I always try to save a few crumbs for the pigeons, who no unfortunately hold the title of vermin, and get a really raw deal 🥺

I would carry on, I'd love to do this!

But - put down a visual marker that will if used consistently, tell them that the food bar is open and the absence of it tells them the food bar is closed.

This could simply be a brightly coloured mat or cloth that you lay out on the floor - feed them close to it, put it away when the food is all gone and march on and DO NOT feed them again.

Just keep repeating this and they will learn that food only happens when the marker is visible, and hopefully this will avoid them getting frustrated. Frustration tends to lead to unwanted behaviours.

The real risks are that, not knowing the criteria to get food, they get frustrated, which pushes them to get closer, intercept you, perhaps start to vocalise at you or even fly at you... and then perhaps start to do this to people with a similar silhouettes or similar clothing.

We have two crows who frequent our garden. The other day I heard a big splash so looked out the window - one of them was having a bath in the pond. Obviously this gave the other crow the idea of diving into the little bird bath, which looked ridiculous.