How do male and female crows tell each other apart, especially during mating time?
They’re all named Sam, but the females spell it with a lower case S.
Confusing as hell, let me tell ya…
Although the differences may be subtle to humans, the crows can discern one from the other easily. Perhaps by odor or some discerning features that male and female crows have that we humans cannot readily see.
It has everything to do whether they are flying above or below the crow they are oogling.
This doesn’t have anything to do with discerning sexes, but I as told by a naturalist friend of mine that crows can distinguish between individuals in a flock/murder (btw all crows in a flock are related) because crow feathers have a sheen to them (kind of like looking at a puddle of gasoline), and a crow’s eye sees others, not as flat black, but as a rainbow. Apparently each crow appears unique that way. Sorry, no cite, as I said, this is based upon something someone told me.
I have fed crows peanuts in my neighborhood for years. One day I was trudging up our hill, wearing a long coat I hadn’t worn in at least a year and I also had an umbrella low over my head to keep off the drizzle. A crow spotted me and swooped and landed nearby. Then another one came. They recognized me only perhaps by my size and the way I walked.
Up in the business district about a mile away, I also bring peanuts for the crows I see. They must see up to a couple thousand people a day. I might only be up that way once or twice a week but they still know me when they see me. One or two will swoop to where they know I can see them, and though it seemed they were the only ones around, more crows will swoop in from nowhere. I’m seriously beginning to think that they have ESP because often they don’t caw.
I do know they are extremely intelligent and have superb powers of observation. If they can tell humans apart from other humans, they probably have no problem telling one crow from another.
Oh, another thing. Since I’ve been observing crows for so many years, I’ve noted that their voices aren’t all the same. Some are lower pitched than others and some are hoarser. Probably crows can hear even more differences in their roostmates’ voices than we humans can.
Not every crow in a flock is related. Flocks can be made up of family members (territory owners) that occasionally have unrelated individuals join. For example, one family group I was watching had a juvenile crow (a kid we banded in the nest) join up for a period of time with a different family group.
Larger flocks that you see during winter are likely a combination of migrants and sometimes local birds. Some of the local birds joining these winter flocks are juveniles that have left home and some territorial adults/juveniles just join for a short period of time (minutes even), particularly if they are at a communal foraging area.
About individual recognition - I think **Tikki ** is right. There’s enough individual variation in the call and even form of crows that us mere humans can tell the one from another, given a little time and patience. I haven’t heard about the iridescence patterns playing a role, but I can say that after handling many hundreds of crows, they do vary in this respect. Whether it plays a role or not, I can’t say. (It is quite beautiful, though.)