Why do crows unsettle me?
A crow on a fence looks at you as if it is making a note. People who find that unsettling are right about one thing: it is.
What people notice
The unease people describe around crows is less about what the bird does than about how it seems to regard them.
- It watches. It turns its head and holds your eye.
- The call is harsh and sounds like a comment.
- It is black all over, eye included.
- It gathers where something has died.
Folklore in many countries made the crow a sign that a death was coming. A crow cannot tell the future. The old stories did get one thing right, though: crows do pay attention to death.
What crows are actually like
- They remember faces, and they pass it on. Researchers in Seattle trapped a few crows while wearing a particular mask. Five years later crows were still scolding anyone in that mask, up to 1.2 kilometres away, and they included birds that had never been caught.Source: Cornell, Marzluff and Pecoraro, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2012
- They gather around their dead. In a 2015 study, crows that saw a person holding a dead crow scolded that person when they came back, and remembered them for as long as six weeks. The gatherings appear to be a way of learning what is dangerous.Source: Swift and Marzluff, Animal Behaviour, 2015
What the unease can point to
The facts suggest the feeling is not foolish. A crow really is watching and really will remember. So the question becomes why being watched and remembered is uncomfortable. Treat these as possibilities, nothing more.
One is being known. Somewhere there may be a person who saw you at your worst and has not forgotten. Most of us would like our mistakes to fade, and the crow is the animal that keeps the file.
Another runs the opposite way. You may be the one with the long memory. Some people can recite a slight from twenty years ago word for word, and go back to it the way a crow goes back to a place where it was wronged. If that is familiar, the dislike may be recognition.
The last is endings. Crows turn up where something has died, and they stay and look. Many of us do the reverse: we leave early, change the subject, keep busy. How you feel about the crow can be close to how you behave when something is over.
Three questions to ask yourself
- What do you still remember that the other person has almost certainly forgotten?
- Who knows something about you that you wish they did not?
- When something ends, do you stay for it or leave early?
Questions people ask
Are crows a bad omen?
No. There is no evidence that a crow signals anything about what is to come. The link with death is old and has a plain source: crows eat carrion and gather around dead crows, so people often saw them where there had been a death.
Do crows really remember human faces?
Yes. In a study in Seattle, crows went on scolding a mask worn by people who had trapped them for at least five years, and other crows learned to do the same.
Is being afraid of crows a phobia?
Finding them eerie is common and is not a phobia. A strong fear of birds that changes where you walk or makes you panic is one, and it is something a doctor or therapist can help with.
What can it mean if crows make me uneasy?
Often it is the feeling of being observed. It can point to something you would like forgotten, to a grudge of your own that you keep going back to, or to how you are around endings. It can also simply be the stories you were told.