The Atlantic

Crows Are Doing the Best They Can

It’s time to give these resourceful, community-minded creatures some credit.
Source: Denis Balibouse / Reuters

The first thing to know about crows is that a group of them is called a murder.

In America, crows count as a Halloween decoration, like skeletons and mini-gravestones. Homeowners perch plastic ones in their trees to instill fear in passersby. People in many cultures consider the crow to be an omen, a harbinger of war and death. In Islamic , reports about Muhammad’s sayings and practices, crows are of the five animals “for which there is no blame on the one who kills them.” On the Faroe Islands, virginal women once a stone, a bone, and a clump of dirt at a crow for some

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