As the crow dies

Corvids, such as crows, rooks and ravens, are some of the smartest animals out there. They can learn to make new sounds, they can cooperate and even use tools. But as Dr Kaeli Swift explains, they also have some intriguing rituals when it comes to their dead... and could even be capable of feeling empathy

- Alice Lipscombe-Southwell

What exactly is a corvid?

Dr Kaeli Swift Corvids are a kind of songbird. Corvids, so the Corvidae family, includes crows, ravens, magpies, jays, rooks, jackdaws and choughs. Ravens are the biggest songbird in the world.

They’re songbirds? But a crow makes a ‘caw caw caw’ noise, which sounds pretty different from other birds.

‘Songbird’ is a little bit of a tricky name because the designation of songbird is based on both the positioning of the feet and, most importantly, the anatomy of the vocal area. And that’s the feature that these birds share with birds like robins and sparrows and all that kind of thing.

Humans produce the sounds that we do using a larynx, and most birds, including songbirds, have what’s called a syrinx. The anatomy does differ a little bit across groups, but the corvid syrinx is going to look pretty similar to other kinds of songbirds. The main difference, though, between crows and ravens and other types of songbirds has less to do with their anatomy and more to do with their brain. Most songbirds have a short window of time when they’re young where they learn every sound that they’re going to make, then that window closes, and that’s it. They don’t make any changes moving forward. But one of the interesting aspects about crows and ravens is that they can learn new sounds throughout their lives. They have really impressive vocal repertoires. Part of the reason that they can make such a wide variety of sounds, including human speech, is because they have independent muscle control on either side of their syrinx, so they can produce two different sounds at the same time.