HOW TO KNOW A CROW

A fulsome appreciation of these intelligent, social, nearly ubiquitous corvids.

Centering attention on the American crow, Savage takes a fictive female she names Oki (“Hello” in Niitsitapi) from hatchling to new mom. Along the way, she dishes out heaping helpings of research-based facts and observations about crow species and behaviors worldwide. Indignantly rejecting “murder” as a collective noun (“That’s so mean!”), she maps out seasonal rounds in extended families loosely organized in larger flocks—explaining how crows play, communicate, construct nests, nurture and train their young, use and even make tools, and generally display every sign of being “alight with awareness.” Poignantly, she notes that while mosquito-borne West Nile virus occasionally makes humans and other sorts of birds ill, for crows it carries a nearly 100% mortality rate. “American Crows,” she writes, leading up to the close, “often lead complex lives, full of drama and intimacy”—“a caws for amazement,” as she puts it elsewhere, and fledgling naturalists will agree. Hudson’s close-up illustrations and spot portraits, appearing on nearly every page, ably support the claim. Human figures rarely appear but seem to show some diversity.

An absorbing study—certainly “caws” for further investigation.