Crows Can Hold A Grudge Way Longer Than You Can

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We’re not kidding. The average life expectancy of a single crow is about seven or eight years in the wild – but “it’s now 14 years that the birds continue to respond to us,” John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington and bona fide corvid expert, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2020. “It’s been ongoing and continues to this day.”

That’s right: their hatred is so pure and focused that it can outlive the birds themselves. And what did Marzluff do to deserve such undying ire? Well, it involves a mask, Dick Cheney, and a minor amount of avian trauma.

“We exposed wild crows to a novel ‘dangerous face’ by wearing a unique face mask as we trapped, banded and released 7–15 birds at five sites near Seattle,” Marzluff and his colleagues wrote in 2010 – rather omitting the important fact that by “unique”, they meant “utterly grotesque and literally designed for Halloween”.

Understandably, after this treatment, “crows consistently used harsh vocalizations to scold and mob people of different sizes, ages, genders and walking gaits who wore the dangerous mask, even when they were in crowds,” the team reported. “In contrast, prior to trapping, few crows scolded people who wore the dangerous mask. Furthermore, after trapping, few crows scolded trappers who wore no mask or who wore a mask that had not been worn during trapping.”

The control masks were spared even though they resembled Dick Cheney, while the ogre mask caught corvid flak regardless of who wore it. And yes, you read that right: it was all the crows in the area that were pissed at their perceived ogrish captor, not just his victims – because, as it turns out, crows are really good at learning from each other.

“Crows are extremely responsive to other crow behavior. They learn from the reactions of other crows,” explained Kevin McGowan, extension associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in a 2009 episode of NPR’s Krulwich Wonders. And they “can do a remarkable job at telling us apart.”

After starting his experiment back in 2006, Marzluff now figures that crows can hold a collective grudge for around 17 years – and if you’re the target of their resentment, that means nearly two decades of Hitchcockian horror. After McGowan banded some crows for research in New York, he reported the birds “com[ing] out of the woods and circle overhead, yelling at me.”

“And you have to understand, this is a public park,” he told NPR. “Hundreds of people […] came there. And, you know, you get kind of paranoid after a while, 'cause everywhere I'd go the crows would be yelling at me. And they wouldn't be yelling at other people, and you just kind of get paranoid.”

The lesson, then? If you see a crow or two, stay on its good side. Or, at the very least, wear a weird mask around them.