“There were three ravens sat on a tree, they were as black as they could be. … Then one of them said to his make, where should we our breakfast take?” That’s a ballad I often enjoy singing, from ...

A “murder” in the light of a full moon: Though it’s not a commonly used term today, a group of crows is called a murder; the name came from their medieval reputation as harbingers of death. Let me ...

Crows and ravens are both black birds, but that’s about where the similarities end. The two birds are notorious for clashing with one another in the wild, and curious researchers from Cornell ...

Battle of the birbs Graphic: Ryan F. Mandelbaum; Raven: Wikimedia user CanadianWikilover; Crow: Wikimedia user Mdf; Sky: Wikimedia user Mohammed Tawsif Salam, Screenshot via Nintendo (Wikimedia ...

DEAR JOAN: On a recent morning, my wife and I saw two ravens perched in a tree at our house. Later, some crows parked themselves in neighboring trees surrounding the ravens. We have never seen ravens ...

Biologist Stacia Backensto has fooled a raven. When trying to recapture birds on Alaska’s North Slope during her graduate student days at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, she wore a mustache and ...

It’s late October, season of the crow. Faux crows hunch over the lintels of Halloween spook houses and perch on the shoulders of would-be witches. The midnight-black birds blot the autumn sunset, and ...

The members of the crow family, which includes crows, jays, magpies and ravens, are a group of highly social and highly intelligent birds. Many researchers believe this to be the most intelligent ...

Ravens are one of the prototypical birds of the higher elevations of the Southern mountains. They look, of course, like their cousin the crow. But they’re much larger birds, having a wingspan that can ...

The notion that crows and ravens might reward humans who provide them food motivated the title of the book Tony Angell and I recently published (Gifts of the Crow; 2012 Simon and Schuster). When I ...

Of course, that razor-sharp memory can be a double-edged sword as ravens are famous for recognizing people who treat them ...