Dried pet food is among their favorite but a cheaper option is whole unshelled peanuts. They also love eggs, tater tots, meat scraps and other nuts.
*Feed them something healthy—unsalted peanuts, with or without the shells are recommended by the crow experts themselves. *Don't throw the nuts AT them, and don't feed them too much. These are wild birds accustomed to gathering their own food—so a few peanuts are plenty.
If you've befriended a crow in your yard recently and want to offer them something they'll love, consider one of their favorites: Nuts, namely peanuts, walnuts, and almonds. Eggs (raw, boiled, scrambled…it doesn't matter to a crow!) Meat scraps like chicken and fish.
Wild crows are not known to create or display art. But they do occasionally leave behind objects like keys, lost earrings, bones, or rocks, for the people who feed them, a behavior that John Marzluff, conservation ecologist and Swift's colleague at the University of Washington, calls “gifting.”
Fruits and Seeds
Seeds and fruits make up nearly three-quarters of the American Crow's diet. This includes: corn, wheat, oats, chokecherries, Poison Ivy, pistachios, grapes, Red Osier Dogwood fruits, Bittersweet Nightshade berries, pecans, and watermelons, among other things.
But, as Odell's connection to crows suggested, the real keys to befriending them are things that are the opposite of what gets views: patience and routine. The crows need to learn you're not a threat, that the food is safe, and that it will be there every day. Crows go viral for bringing their human friends gifts.
Although crows don't make good pets, they can still socialize with humans. One thing crows and suitable pet birds have in common is becoming “friends” with humans. You don't need to have a pet crow to enjoy being cautiously friendly with one in your neighborhood.
Dried pet food is among their favorite but a cheaper option is whole unshelled peanuts. They also love eggs, tater tots, meat scraps and other nuts.
Water is a crow's best friend! Another great way to get crows to visit your yard is to provide a consistent water source. Crows will not only use it to keep hydrated but also to bathe and stay clean. The best way to offer water is to buy a bird bath.
If your friendship with crows is based on food they remember your generosity and bring their friends. Lots of friends. They can be quite demanding and don't understand when you stop feeding them. Not everyone appreciates this.
Crows and ravens have a particular liking for grapes, soft fruits, potatoes, nuts and grains. They remove fruit directly from trees, land on trellises which collapse under their weight, and despite their size, can perch directly on stalks of grain, snapping off plants such as wheat and sorghum.
And if you need another reason to be nice to crows, they can also remember faces for years. Humans aren't the only animals to note their departed.
The Advantages of Befriending Crows
You can find uplifting stories online of crows helping the humans that feed them. For example, if you keep chickens, they could warn you of other predator birds getting too close. Sometimes they also leave gifts to their feeders.
Crows are very social and can even bond with humans. Commonly, it has been noticed that crows forage on the food disposed by humans. Moreover, they prove to be very useful when it comes to controlling pests that destroy crops.
Crows will eat just about anything, so you are pretty safe regardless of the food you put out for them. To first attract crows, you will want something noticeable, like peanuts in the shell. Once they become regulars in your yard, you can use a wider variety of foods, including kibbled pet food or meat scraps.
They love shiney things, so scatter a few balls of foil around where your local crows can see them. When the crows light to pick them up, put out a feeder with their preferred food. Hopefully they'll fly to the food, with their foil ball in beak.
American Crow
Male and female sit side by side on a wire or branch, often near their nest tree. One stretches out its neck, inviting the other to groom its feathers.
House crows are classified as a prohibited pest animal under the Victorian Catchment and Land Protection Act 1994. The importation, keeping, breeding and trading of this species, without appropriate permits, is illegal and penalties apply. The house crow is not known to occur in the wild in Australia.
Crows enjoy treats such as dog food, hardboiled eggs, or even something as simple as leftover bread (nothing with high sugar content).
After accepting plenty of peanuts from their kind neighbor, the birds started giving “thank you” gifts. Crows are known to give small gifts to people who pay attention to them and feed them.
Feeding them may depress other bird populations. Corvids are part of the natural ecosystem, but the problem goes beyond “natural” because many corvid populations are artificially higher due to anthropogenic food subsidies – human garbage, bird feeders, scraps, etc.
Adult carrion crows seem to tolerate cheese relatively well, and in fact, they quite often actually enjoy a cheese snack. This is most likely due to the fact that as carrion eaters these birds are better adapted to the broad variety of man made food sources, and are therefore more tolerant than other bird species.
The particular nuance of yellow used for the garbage bags has the effect of blocking one of those four primary colors. This rattles the crow's eyesight, and as a result it cannot see what is inside the bag.”
This means that crows can be considered a good omen or a bad omen, depending on the number of crows and the context. "Seeing a single crow is often thought to be a bad omen, but seeing two could indicate good luck is coming," says Compora. "Seeing three suggests impending change."
So crows can indeed start “sulking” when they're exposed to a peer in a bad mood. These results suggest that crows are capable of assessing the emotional state of other crows and can be “contaminated” by them without demonstrating any behavioral contagion (the “observers” didn't behave like the “spies”).