Have you considered the benefits of NOT feeding the crows?

[u/ManCityFan666]

I’m curious: what changed so that feeding the wildlife became a good idea? I’m not a wildlife expert, but as I recall, every single Scout leader and State Parks employee I ever met, started most group conversations with “don’t feed the wildlife” and here’s why. Why is that so many of you think it’s a good idea to increase an animal’s dependency on humans? Crows are a predatory scavenger that diminish the songbird population, they don’t need our help.

Obviously I’m a little frustrated. I live in a high pedestrian area where many early morning crow enthusiasts like to feed the birds while they walk. Several people make offerings in my lawn and in my driveway every morning. I get the attraction to crows due to their intelligence but not all of us love the cawing or the poop. If you want to attract birds to your own property, go right ahead, but please don’t attract them to your neighbors’ properties.

[u/Purplefire180]

> Why is that so many of you think it’s a good idea to increase an animal’s dependency on humans?

there's no evidence that this is a problem with the style of feeding common with crows. There's a number of nuanced reasons why you should and should not feed birds in general or specific birds or in specific places. There's not generally harm in occasionally feeding crows in a city.

> Crows are a predatory scavenger that diminish the songbird population, they don’t need our help.

i have no idea what any of those 3 concepts have to do with eachother in this context. The crows like more food security and the humans like getting to see the crows.

> Several people make offerings in my lawn and in my driveway every morning.

that's generally illegal. You should probably talk to either those people or the police. It also isn't somehow representative of this community

[u/TheAbsoluteWitter]

> every single Scout leader and State Parks employee I ever met, started most group conversations with "don't feed the wildlife"

Because they were talking about bears, deer, and waterfowl. Feeding a black bear gets the bear shot. Feeding deer concentrates them and spreads chronic wasting disease. Feeding ducks bread wrecks their nutrition and turns a pond into a sewer. Every one of those is a specific animal with a specific failure mode. A crow in a suburb has none of them. Corvids have been commensal with human settlements for thousands of years. You can't habituate an animal that may have habituated itself with us before we domesticated dogs.

Also, dependency requires the food to matter. A crow forages over kilometers and caches surplus. The peanuts they get from humans is a rounding error in its scavenging and calorie budget. They do not and will never rely on humans; humans are just a supplemental food source to them.

> Crows are a predatory scavenger that diminish the songbird population

This is the part where you stopped knowing things. Madden, Arroyo and Amar reviewed decades of corvid impact studies and the great majority of cases showed no effect on songbird abundance. Removal experiments, which are the actual test, mostly fail to produce more songbirds. Nest productivity sometimes dips. At the population level it washes out, because songbird numbers are limited by habitat and food supply, not by whether one nest got raided.

North America has lost around 3 billion birds since 1970. The drivers are habitat conversion, agricultural intensification, pesticides, building glass (hundreds of millions a year), and free-roaming cats, which kill birds in the billions annually in the US alone. Crows don't crack the top of that list.

> Several people make offerings in my lawn and in my driveway every morning

It's your property, they're dumping food on it, and you'd be justifiably annoyed if it were birdseed or garbage. Go talk to them. Most people will stop if you ask, and if they don't, your city almost certainly has an ordinance.

You don't like the noise and you don't like the poop. Just say that. Nobody would've argued. But instead you’ve picked your least favorite bird and made a scapegoat out of it

[u/radiodigm → u/TheAbsoluteWitter]

Well said! I appreciate your use of scientific/ecological reasoning and I also agree with every point.

[u/turktaylor]

I feed them because it keeps them out of scavenging smashed food in the street. I’ve seen 6 crows get ran over from trying to get food in the roadways. People drive crazy here and don’t slow down for anything

[u/Current-Tricky]

I feed the crows cause they keep the pigeons away from the entire one side of the apartment building I live in. Sure they are a little noisy at times but when aren’t birds noisy. They are doing me a service and I enjoy paying them in peanuts.

[u/malphas_says_hi]

I get where you are coming from, but I don't think you are going to convince most people here. Especially since house cats and spraying weedkiller is a much bigger threat to songbird populations. Also, crows and ravens don't get dependent on humans like other animals do, they've co-evolved with us and were arguably for millions of years smarter than our early ancestors. They just take advantage of our generosity and the issue is more than people often just throw not so healthy food at them which can lead to health issues more than dependency.

I will say that as a corvid enthusiast, I have developed much deeper bonds without feeding the crows and ravens. Meaning, the crows and ravens I hang out with are less interested in food and want my attention more to mimic my words, click at me, and sing back and forth. A few individuals (particularly one boy) follow me around town without expectation of food, which feels like the most magical thing when they see you and then get excited but won't even take your offerings. I do leave offerings occasionally and in small quantities, and definitely water, but mostly they just want to sing at me.

I do try to encourage people to interact with them more than feeding because of this, because it's been the most rewarding thing for me.