If they do it when food is there, it isn’t really beneficial to alert everyone else to it, is it?. The calling might just be a reaction of excitement.
What a great topic.
I have to tell a tale (tail…snerk) about when I was basically homeless and camping in the deep woods.
Every morning at dawn, I had a raven (crow, whatever) as an alarm clock. He/she would talk loudly from a tree just outside my tent. At first I was pissed because I wanted to sleep a bit more, but became enthralled by the company even though it didn’t like the coffee I insisted on brewing before I became more social-able to the world at large.
I started out leaving left-overs and trail mix out under the pine tree next to me, and he or her woke me up to remind me breakfast needed to be served.
It never came close to me, but we got to know each other during those two years. I miss that in some strange way.
ETA: yeah I know camping, and hazards of food left outside. It wasn’t bear country, and the only other “visitor” was a friendly skunk, who was shooed away by … guess who? Without me getting sprayed. Upon which I appreciated the wake-up call from Mister/Misses Crow.
Anchorage has a ton of ravens and magpies, both corvids, of course. The magpies that nested at my wife’s building were a real nuisance when the birds had eggs and young, and would swoop and squawk at anybody walking by. It was a government building, and when they received a large number of complaints from pedestrians, they called in the Fish and Wildlife people who sent someone to remove the eggs before they hatched (to discourage nesting in the huge spruce trees there).
The birds came to not only recognize the man and attack him as soon as they saw him, they also came to recognize his vehicle, so that even when he wore a disguise, they would swarm at him as soon as he pulled up in front of the building. He couldn’t get near the building without a ruckus even when it wasn’t egg season, and he was even attacked in other parts of town. Man, they hated that guy.
What’s more, laden with a cocoanut an American Crow can weigh 2065 grams.
Sometimes you can’t make out the lyrics, true, but the tune is nice, if you’re a certain kind of person:The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark,
When neither is attended, and I think
The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
Crows have two sets of vocal cords, so it may be possible that the sounds they are producing are more elaborate than we realize. They can in fact learn to produce human-quality articulation.
Since we are in GQ…That site appears to be serious, but unless I missed the reference section, just saying you think you know what a sound means doesn’t make it true. In the absence of proof, claiming you know what a bird is saying is only fantasy, not fact.