Kissing Crows

Sunde White illustrates her essay about the time she saw crows kissing on a fence

I love crows so much.  They are so smart and funny.  On windy days up in the hills you can see them in groups playing a complex game of catch with a pine cone, swooping up and waiting for their teammate below to catch up and then dropping it down to them to catch.  I’ve also seen them playing a combination of hide and go seek and tag through the trestles of a bridge. They have large community groups and help each other out, protecting each other’s nests from the hawks.

My favorites are the lone couples just living their best lives together, turns out that crows mate for life. There’s a pair that lives in the cliffs above a beach I take the dogs to.  They live there peacefully together.  Sometimes they get a visit from another crow couple that lives at the farm nearby and they sit on the cliff top together, enjoying the view.

One day I saw the couple sitting together on a broken down fence.  One crow shyly hopped closer to its partner until they were shoulder to shoulder. Then I squinted my eyes, hardly able to believe what I was seeing.  Did that crow just lean in for a kiss???   It was a nice long romantic kiss that only ended when they realized some weird lady was videoing them.  I apologized and hopped in my truck to go.

But do crows kiss? I wondered.   I asked the gooogle machine and a bunch of different crow researchers agree that they do.  They kiss for romantic reasons and also to make up after a fight.  AAwwwww.  I just found one more reason to love crows.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!!!

image of two crows kissing in Montara California by Sunde White

Love Birds