Do birds get annoyed when they're eating roadkill and you interrupt them?
I was driving back from the Post Office an hour ago. A dead animal (raccoon I think) was in the middle of my lane, and a couple of good-size crows were feasting on the carcass.
When my car got close – maybe 40 feet away – the crows launched themselves from the pavement into the air to avoid being crushed themselves.
My question: were the crows pissed off at me for interrupting them? Are their brains sophisticated enough to be annoyed?
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If you ever come across birds feasting like that when you are walking, especially crows, they will scold you until you leave. So ye, they get annoyed.
They’re intelligent birds but the very smart will learn to not let interruptions of that sort ruin their day.
Those are my thoughts on crows
I was once dive bombed by a hawk. I think it was mad as I had interrupted a potential dinner and ruined his day.
They probably do get annoyed.
Which is why you should just run them over. Can’t be annoyed if you are dead.
I’ve been at a vantage point to observe such things a lot.
They do not get annoyed, and in fact, they are too intelligent for such pettiness. They just wait until it is clear to resume feeding. What they do get irritated about is when they have been on fire watch all day on top of Walmart, and nobody is dropping any food for them. Waiting for a cab to get me home, I had one chewing me out from the roof nonstop. He KNEW I had a box of donuts from the day old rack. Finally I dig one out, and toSs a generous chunk for him a few feet away. He grabbed it and returned to the roof. Yeah, then come the cousins.
Crows are intelligent. All birds can be annoyed. Whether crows tend to be annoyed by cars interrupting their roadkill buffet, I don’t know. They are certainly inconvenienced and endangered, but I imagine they’re also relieved you’re not taking their food or coming after them.
In my experience observing and reading about crow behavior, it’s clear that crows tend to understand car traffic quite well. Many crows even purposely place hard shelled nuts in the road to get cars to run them over to break the shells.
Again, crows are intelligent. They study human, predict, and adapt to human behavior. I think they may tend to accept car traffic and not be annoyed by it per se, unless you were to make a point of messing with them. They do tend to seem annoyed when/if you go near their nests, or dead/injured crows, and might get upset if you took their roadkill away.
Oh, and once you do annoy them, crows tend to remember you for a long time. Even later generations of crows can remember to torment you specifically if you mess with them.
I’ve had aggressive city seagulls ruin my dining experience. It annoyed me. If we suspend our disbelief, and project human emotions onto crows, then it’s obvious that crows would have the same feeling when we interrupt their dining experience…
I suspect, however that natural selection has optimized crow brains for solving problems, finding food, reproduction and survival, and less on emotional intelligence. I’m not an expert though. It could be that crows need emotions for heard survival and kin selection…
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