Walrus Magazine - As the crow flies

…Crows are unpopular, with good reason. They are obnoxious bird bullies with shrill voices, scattering trash and gumming up eavestroughs with their detritus. But perhaps our scorn springs from a deeper source.

McGill University biologist Louis Lefebvre has suggested that we dislike them because they remind us of our unsavoury selves: opportunistic and invasive. Plus we would both eat anything to survive. That last attribute may have been the turning point between our ancient reverence for corvids — among Native American and early Asian peoples, for example — and our modern aversion to them…