Are you better than a crow?

Most mornings I step out on my deck and throw a handful of peanuts out on the driveway for the crows. 

Sometimes the crows are already on a neighbor's roof staring in my office window waiting, but today none were in sight. Regardless, within seconds a single crow showed up, landed on the phone line, looked at me, looked at the ground, and started cawing. 

He didn’t swoop down and eat his fill, and THEN start cawing. First he verified there was food, and then started yelling until other crows showed up. It took a few minutes for another crow to appear. Once his buddy showed up, he swooped down and started eating while the buddy cawed the news. The process repeated until there were half a dozen crows at which point they started just swooping in and eating without first pausing to spread the word. 

Wifey (who took this picture above at some other point) suggested that this is simply self protection. Crow 1 is worried this might be a trap and wants a crow 2 to watch its back while it eats. I’m sure there’s some truth to that. My first thought was simply love. Crow 1 found something good, and knew it would taste even better if others shared in it too. There’s a middle ground in this thinking that beyond this simply being a trap, the crows know the flock needs to be healthy as a whole or there’s no one to mate with. There’s the potential that next time crow 2 finds food it will call for crow 1, what goes around comes around. You can dissect crow 1’s actions into self serving motivations if you want, and of course many things can all be true at once. 

The fact remains. That crow sat on a line cawing for others before it took a single peanut. It wasn’t “get yours, then help others.” It certainly wasn’t “I did this on my own because I’m a bold individual so I should reap all the benefits myself.” As humans we like to throw around phrases like “it’s a jungle out there” as excuses for our selfishness. The fact of the matter is nature knows better. A monkey that hoards all the bananas is not tolerated by the rest of the troop. The alpha wolf may eat first, but that same alpha dog would howl until the pack came if it made a kill on its own. 

From time to time, we should all ask ourselves if we’re behaving better than a crow.