Crows may sound unpleasant and represent a living symbol of death, but it seems a murder of crows has a soft side – even when it is made up of relative strangers.
Crows belong to a group of birds called , known for their intelligence. They are loyal birds, forming long-lasting social relationships with specific individuals.
To find out how they form new relationships, Miriam Sima at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, and her coauthors studied crows that were unfamiliar to each other. They wanted to see how the crows would react to scuffles amongst relative strangers.
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The team kept , native to Europe and Asia, in a cage. When they put food into the cage, they noticed the birds fought more when the food was limited than when it was abundant. The food shortage caused tempers to flare up – in some cases worse than others.
When the crows were only mildly aggressive to another, the aggressor would often seek the victim out after the food was gone. It would then sit close by, touching and even preening the victim’s feathers.
However, if the violence was a little more severe, the perpetrators kept a wide berth, and the victims often sought out consolation from a crow that had not been involved in the squabble.
The study is the first to show that corvids engage in flexible reconciliation and third-party consolation. Other animals, including some with a bad reputation like hyenas, have been known to kiss and make up after spats. Sima says the findings support the idea that social animals only seek reconciliation if important relationships have been disrupted.
Ethology
