I was waiting to escort one of our summer students to our secure area at lunch when I heard a mallard duck fly overhead. I looked up and lo, it was no mallard at all but a crow imitating one! There is a wetland adjacent to our shop so it probably picked it up from there. There are few things more surreal than seeing a quacking crow…
Corvids Rock!
Now I know they have a few behaviors that some people don’t appreciate but I still think they are the coolest birds in the herd.
Herd of crows?
Heard of 'em? Why, I just had a conversation with one this morning!
Yeah, they quack, don’t they?
But it doesn’t echo, and nobody knows why.
I love corvids .
Have you seen the video of the crow snowboarding? There are a ton of crow amd raven videos but i really like this one:
I’m so glad somebody got that! 
I started a thread a while ago about making friends with the crows. Lately the number of them has gone down, but there’s one or two that seems just a little bit comfortable with me. As long as he gets his peanut.
Are you sure it wasn’t a Fish Crow? Their call is very different from American Crows, and sounds a bit like quacking.
Fish Crows are almost identical to American Crows but smaller, and live mostly along the eastern and Gulf coasts.
I like that one, too. And then there’s the guy who invented and built a crow vending machine. He put it out and loaded it with yummy things and the crows taught themselves how to use it pretty quickly. (they drop a rock into a hole and the treat is dispensed)
This one is pretty cool. 
Yesterday when I was walking the dog and saw a crow. I said hello, like I always do. I could have sworn the crow said hello back. By the way, our dog seems to know that crows are cool. She never hassles them when they land in the yard.
Don’t forget their little blue cousins, the jays. I volunteer at a wildlife rescue, this time of year the “nestling room” is chock full of fake nests. There’s always a laundry basketful of young western scrub-jays. After a three hour shift, feeding them every 20 minutes, I’ve picked out my favourite. Even as ugly, scrawny, demanding eating machines, they have SO MUCH personality. Bird-ality. You know.
I was walking in a graveyard once and I passed some graves of babies. Suddenly I heard someone say “Mama.”
Needless to say, I was rather spooked, especially when the voice repeated the word. Then I noticed it seemed to be coming from a tree. I looked up and saw a crow in the tree, and I remembered that crows could mimic human speech.
So I hope that’s what it was.
Jackdaws are my favourite. Their smaller size makes them a bit bolder, so they quite often interact with humans (they can take off quicker to get away from trouble, so they need be less cautious than, say, rooks).
Bingo! I learned two things this morning; Fish crows are a thing, and that this one is seriously lost because I live in NE Alberta. That’s a tiny bit away from their normal habitat based off the maps I looked at.
I’m also quite partial to Whiskyjacks (Gray Jays). Very clever little birds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltUYYYNmFLk
Which crows scare the crap out of me at the Walmart parking lot by mimicking the sound of my brakes falling apart?
In that case, maybe it actually was an American Crow giving a odd call.
Prince thought the same, so he wrote Little Red Corvid.
That would be the Knuter crow, named after the critical valve on automotive brake systems that, when it goes bad, makes a sound eerily like the mating call of the horny male Knuter crow. Get either your brakes or the crow fixed now.
