Crows: Genius Birds

By using the vehicle of a graphic novel involving an extended conversation between a dog and a crow that occurs as the animal pair move through a neighborhood wreaking havoc on garbage cans, Vanderklugt cleverly shares a great deal of information about crows with her middle school audience. The book’s opening finds a murder of crows about to launch “Operation: Dog Food”, with one unnamed crow, simply called Crow, taking the lead. No, the murder is not about to attack and devour a dog. Instead, Crow, self-described as “the smartest crow in the world”, uses its intelligence to dupe a dog, Buddy, into helping the rest of the crows secure food.

Locating Buddy in his yard, Crow befriends him and suggests that “we could go out to eat.” When Buddy points out that “I’m stuck in the yard though”, Crow opens the gate latch using his beak and feet. Crow is aware that humans throw leftover food into trash cans, and garbage makes up half the diet of urban crows with insects and worms accounting for the next largest food component. Crow, however, faces two problems in accessing the neighborhood’s trash can smorgasbord. Firstly, the cans are too big for a crow to open or tip over, and, secondly, the cans come in three colours, gray, blue and green, but humans only put food in just one trash can, and Crow does not know which colour that is. Buddy’s size and strength are the solution to the first problem, and he tips over all three cans, revealing the green cans to be the food holders. Armed with both colour recognition ability, something Buddy lacks, and his species’ memory ability, Crow directs Buddy to tip over only the green cans as they move forward. “Operation: Dog Food” concludes when Buddy’s humans find him missing, and he hears them calling his name.

During the period the newly minted friends are together, Vanderklugt smoothly inserts a lot of crow-related information into their conversations, beginning with identifying where crows fit in the bird taxonomy before moving on to explain how the makeup of crows’ brains explains its “smarts”. Among the many other things that readers go on to learn is that crows can recognize colours, use tools, remember where they cached food, recall specific human faces, mimic all sorts of noises, engage in play and solve problems. Crow also explains the advantages of the crows’ practice of cooperative breeding plus the actual purpose of what human’s have labeled as “crow funerals”. Vanderklugt, who is also the book’s illustrator, slightly anthropomorphizes the animals visually but never to the point of making them appear cartoonish.

End matter in Crows: Genius Birds includes a three-page “Glossary” of terms that have been bolded in the text, a page containing four “Notes” that expand upon points made in the text, and a three-page bibliography of books, articles and Web sources. Just before the bibliography, Vanderklugt inserts “Living with Crows 101", a graphic spread that offers responses to four scenarios/questions:

I found a baby crow on the ground! Should I help it?

Help! Crows keep dive-bombing me!

How do I get crows to bring me gifts?

What should I feed crows

After reading Crows: Genius Birds, middle schoolers, hopefully some future ornithologists among them, will look at these noisy birds with a new respect for their intelligence and ingenuity.