Spotting Crow Families

An adult on either side, the juvenile in the middle.

This post is for animal lovers and especially for science-loving parents with little kids. Learn the call of the juvenile crow, and you’ll be able to find crow families for fun and education.

Here in Seattle, you can often hear fledged juvenile crows pestering their parents for food. Here’s a link to an audio clip of this distinctive call.

Juvenile crow call

In this call, a parent might recognize the whiny tone of a demanding child. It’s April, and the complaining has begun.

If you hear this call, it’s often easy to find the juvenile. They’re not in the nest. Instead, Mom and Dad are taking Junior out for a scavenging tour. Mostly Mom and Dad get food and fly it back to Junior. Sometimes you’ll hear Junior’s call start fine and get garbled. That’s when a parent puts food in its mouth in mid-whine. As Junior grows, Mom and Dad act less and less accommodating. Junior has to fly closer and closer to the food to get fed. Eventually Junior has to follow Mom and Dad to where the food, and finally Junior is scavenging on its own.

You can spot a juvenile crow because it looks like a goof. Adult crows are just the opposite: savvy, aware, together, and poised. Juveniles are awkward, with clumsy posture and a certain air of cluelessness. Sort of like a teen boy who’s grown so tall in the last year that he doesn’t know what to do with his limbs. Other than this cluelessness, juveniles are hard to tell from the parents. A juvenile’s feathers puff out and make it look big, probably an adaptation that helps juveniles get eaten less often.

If you spook the parents, they may fly away, in which case the juvenile will follow them. If you hold still, you may be able to observe the adults feeding the child. Looking straight at a crow makes it more wary. It’s less threatening to watch them out of the corner of your eye.

If you’re a city parent, crow families are an opportunity to show your kids a little bit of nature and the cycle of life. For example, crows are a lesson in pair-bonding. Mom and Dad crow work side-by-side, not just raising kids year after year but scavenging day to day. Very different from robins, where the males love to fight each other and the most successful ones establish families with multiple females. Robins also choose mates over again each mating season. That’s a different sort of lesson for your kids.

Bonus self-referential question: Ask a kid if they can think of any other kind of animal that takes its young ones out and about to learn about the world. If you’re walking with that kid in a park telling them about crows, then the answer is you.