I just saw one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen in my life. I heard a bunch of birds squawking outside, really loudly, so I looked out my bedroom window to see what was going on and I saw about a dozen crows making up a three-foot circle. There was another crow in the middle of the circle, and all the other crows were violently pecking at the crow in the middle, it was some kind of mass attack, it looked like the mob was trying to kill the lone center crow…
My first instinct was to open the window and yell out and break it up, but then I realized, what if this is some kind of crow justice and I’m interfering? The crow in the middle who was being attacked by the others must have done something wrong, at least in the crow world, and the other crows were exacting punishment or retribution. I swear to God this is a true story.
Does anyone have any idea what was going on? Why would a bunch of crows gang up on another crow? Crows are supposed to be among the smartest not just birds but all animals, so I think there was some rhyme and reason to this.
There was an issue of Sandman that included the phenomenon, with various characters guessing why crows did that. I’ve never known if it was something that actually happened, or if was a myth.
Looks like it happens. Thanks for posting the confirmation.
Oh, in the issue, one character (Abel) claimed to know what the crows were doing. The crow in the center was telling a story. The rest were critics.
Crows are gregarious, and stick together in related groups. Maybe the victim was an intruder, and they were telling him not so gently that he was not welcome in the group’s territory.
I work at a university that has a world-renowned experts on crows working at it. I’ve met him a few times - he sometimes takes the same bus home that I do. Now, I’m not the expert that he is but I know he’s referred in books of his about crows to “crow assassinations.” I wonder if that is what you were witness to.
Ravens (closely related to crows, both members of genus corvus) have been known to mob other ravens to censure them for bad behavior – stealing food, territorial intrusions, etc. There is a corvid mob justice system that escalates punishments – first verbal warnings, then gentle peckings, and eventually the deliberate group execution of the criminal if that individual continues to do things the group doesn’t like.
In a similar situation (but probably not what you saw) juveniles also gang up on adults to chase them out of their feeding area, presumably because individual juveniles can’t outcompete individual adults.
The first time I read the OP without my glasses I misread about half the instances of the word “crow” as “cow”. Trying to understand which cows were doing what to which crows & vice versa was hard. The three foot circle of cows was especially perplexing.
