First published October 3, 2018.
Short answer: probably not. A clip of a crow apparently dropping a piece of bread next to a mouse in a car park went viral in 2018 as proof of a kind-hearted bird. Corvid researcher Kaeli Swift looked at it closely and concluded that the crow was most likely hiding its food for later, and that the mouse simply happened to be in the right place. That does not make crows any less remarkable. Their real abilities, from recognising human faces to solving multi-step puzzles, are well documented.
The viral crow and mouse video
The footage, shared widely on social media, shows a crow on a parking lot with a lump of bread and a small mouse nearby (circled in red in the still above). The crow picks at the bread, moves around, and the bread ends up close to where the mouse is. Captions called it a crow "sharing lunch" with a hungry friend.
Biologist Jerry Coyne posted the clip on his blog Why Evolution Is True in February 2018, asking whether it could be altruism and inviting readers to judge. His commenters split: some saw generosity, others thought the crow was distracting the mouse, playing with it, or hiding the bread. One wondered why a mouse would be out in an open car park in daylight at all.
(The Facebook video originally embedded here is no longer available.)
What a crow researcher saw: caching, not sharing
In September 2018 Kaeli Swift, who studies crow behaviour, published a breakdown on her blog Corvid Research titled "No, that crow is not sharing with a mouse". She agreed that at first glance it looks like sharing, but pointed to the moment, just under a minute into the clip, when the crow picks up bits of debris and lays them over the food.
Crows, like many corvids, hide food to eat later, a behaviour called caching. Covering a morsel with leaves or litter is a textbook example. As Swift put it: "That's not a signal of sharing, that's caching loud and clear."
She also explained how scientists define the behaviour people were hoping for. Food sharing is "the transfer of a defendable food item from one individual to another", and in corvids it is rare and happens within social groups, not with strangers and not with other species. Her conclusion was that the clip shows a coincidental meeting of two animals each trying to get what they can, rather than friendship. She also dismissed the idea that the crow was baiting the mouse to catch it, since the bird walked away and paid little attention.
A popular Tumblr list about crow intelligence
Around the same time, a Tumblr post listing reasons why "crows are scary" was widely shared next to the video. It mixes solid science with a few exaggerations.
Crows and ravens belong to the corvid family, which also includes jays, magpies and rooks. Many species have adapted well to towns and cities, which is one reason people notice their behaviour so often.
Checking the list point by point:
- Tool use: true. New Caledonian crows shape twigs and leaves into hooked tools to pull insect larvae out of holes, and can combine objects into compound tools, according to the summary of research on Wikipedia's Corvidae article.
- Brain size: broadly true. Corvids' brain-to-body mass ratio is comparable to that of non-human great apes and cetaceans, and only slightly below that of humans.
- Talking: partly true. Some crows and ravens can mimic sounds, including words, but they do not learn speech as readily as parrots.
- Remembering faces: true, and the mask story is real. In studies led by John Marzluff at the University of Washington, researchers wore particular masks while catching and banding American crows. Crows afterwards scolded anyone wearing the "dangerous" mask, and birds that had never seen the capture joined in, showing that the information spread between crows and across generations (see John Marzluff on Wikipedia).
- Changing migration because of farmers: unverified. We could not find good evidence for this specific claim, so treat it as internet lore.
What crows can really do
Strip away the hype and the real record is still impressive. Crows recognise individual people and can stay wary of a threatening face for years, which is where the idea of crows "holding a grudge" comes from. A carrion crow has reportedly been seen placing nuts on a pedestrian crossing so that passing cars would crack them, then waiting for the lights to stop traffic before collecting the pieces; it is a famous anecdote, but an anecdote rather than a controlled study.
The so-called crow funerals are also real behaviour, if less sentimental than the name suggests. Crows often gather noisily around a dead crow, and researchers who have studied these gatherings interpret them mainly as a way of learning about danger: who or what killed it, and where. Magpies have also been described performing grief-like rituals.
The puzzle-solving is perhaps the best evidence of all. The BBC Earth clip below, from the 2014 series Inside the Animal Mind, follows a crow nicknamed 007 as it works through a complex, multi-step puzzle to reach a food reward.
How to watch animal videos with a sharper eye
The crow and mouse clip is a good lesson in how quickly a caption can become the story. A few habits help:
- Describe before you explain. Note what the animal actually does (picks up debris, walks away) before deciding what it means.
- Ask what is normal for the species. Caching is everyday crow behaviour; sharing food with a mouse would be extraordinary.
- Look for what happened before and after. A minute of footage rarely shows the whole encounter.
- Check with specialists. Researchers who study a species often explain viral clips on their own blogs or social media, and their answers are usually more interesting than the myth.
The crow may not have been generous, but it was doing something clever: securing food for later in a busy, risky place. That is the real crow, and it is fascinating enough.
Sources: Kaeli Swift, Corvid Research: No, that crow is not sharing with a mouse; Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution Is True: Corvid altruism?; Wikipedia: Corvidae; Wikipedia: John Marzluff; BBC Earth: Are Crows the Ultimate Problem Solvers?; Tumblr list by user fangirling-so-hard-rn (screenshots).
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