“ Even the blackest of them all, the Crow.” Longfellow. BLACK though he is, the Crow may fairly head the list for more reasons than one. His clan is reckoned by most ornithologists as the most blue-blooded among the birds, and comes first in the order of precedence in the official list in the “ Fauna of British India.” And he himself , full no doubt of consciousness of his egregious merits, has already made his bow to all my readers, even if they have resided in India but for a day. Various people have amused themselves at the expense of naturalists who call him Corvus svlendens, but it would be hard to find a better name. See him, as I first saw him, in the London Zoo among a number of other species of his kind, and you will at once pronounce him the sleekest, glossiest, and best got-up fellow of the lot, for most of his upper plumage has an exquisite satiny gloss of purple and green, admirably set off by his grey neck and coal-black mask and cap. In this pattern of colour, as well as in size, he certainly very much recalls the jackdaw (Corvus monedula) at home, but he has a very much longer arid heavier bill, and dark instead of white eyes. The difference between the two species may be at once noticed even in the mounted specimens in a Museum, and is much more conspicuous in the living birds, as specific distinctions most commonly are.

There is nothing to choose r in the matter of gloss and richness of piumage between the male and female Crows, but the former’s bigger head and bill will distinguish him easily if both are seen together : the difference in feature is hardly marked enough to sex any Crow by itself.  Young Crows when they leave the nest have light blue eyes and pink mouths, but they do not look innocent on that account rather, with their duller, shabbier plum- age, more blackguardly than their dark-eyed, black- mawed parents ; the old Crow being, if anything, rather blacker inside than out, as far as one can see when he opens his mouth to caw.

The Crow, unlike the Ethiopian of Scripture, can change his skin, or rather his feathers, for pied, white and dun- coloured specimens are not unknown ; one of the last men- tioned kind lived for more than a dozen years in the Alipore Zoo. The white birds have flesh-coloured legs and beaks, and in the duns the parts that should be grey in the normally-coloured Crow are lighter than the rest.

Such ‘ ‘ off-coloured ‘ ‘ Crows are said to be tabooed by Crow society, but this does not seem to be the case with birds suffering from deformity or disease. I knew for years a Crow residing in or near Sudder Street which suffered from some unsightly and doubtless highly unpleasant disease of the feet, which makes those members look as if the bird had just been walking in thick mud ; and evidently they were very tender, judging from the gingerly way in which this sufferer walked. Yet I can not doubt from the many accounts I have received of it that a damaged Crow is often worried to death by its fellows, and I myself once saw one that seemed to have been having a very bad time at their hands, or what did duty as such. But, nevertheless, the Crow is a bird of many social virtues ; he will certainly rescue a friend in distress if he can, for his evident and loudly expressed indignation when one handles a dead or living comrade of his makes it plain that a less powerful enemy than man would probably be seriously attacked. Also he is a good husband, feeding his wife assiduously, and letting her pull their common booty away from him; and a tender parent, much attached to his abominable offspring, in defence of which Crows will attack even a human being at times. The Crow, however, while looking leniently on head-tickling and such-like simple connubial reciprocities, is very severe upon any unfortunate couple of his kind who go too far in a public display of affection, as I have witnessed on more than one occasion ; and as for the wing-drooping, tail-cocking strut which the English rook indulges in during the breeding season, any Calcutta Crow who presumed to show of! in such a way would most likely be very soon taught that it was “ no matter for his swellings, nor his turkey-cocks.” This persistent interference by Crows in each other’s domestic affairs may be the reason why the r e seem to be so few nests in proportion to the numbers of Crows one sees. Although this Crow lives so much in the company of man, it has not taken much to nesting in buildings, usually preferring a tree ; though here and there pairs will attempt a nest on a house, and Mr. B. Aitken, in Hume’s “Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds,” has given a long and amusing account of an idiotic couple who wasted a whole breeding season in trying to make nests in utterly impossible positions in the verandah of the Madras Mail office ; other eccentrics, wiser in their way. have built nests of wire, and in one case even of gold and silver spectacle frames. I have seen one bird which was vainly trying with its mate to construct a nest in one of the little round windows of the Economic and Art section of the Museum, soaking twigs in water, for what reason I cannot divine, unless he thought they would thereby become softer and stay in position, which he was not at all successful in getting them to do. The Crow evidently knows that water has a soften- ing effect, for I have seen a bird come down to a tank with a piece of bread in his bill, put it into the water to soak, while he had a drink and then fly off with it. I have seen jackdaws also in the London Zoo do a similar thing. It is indeed curious to speculate on the extent of the Crow’s intelligence. Sometimes, when flying, you will see him transfer something from his bill to his feet, and carry it thus a .little way, as if he were trying to learn the kite’s trick of using his feet for transport. Yet he never seems to learn to pick things off water with his feet, though pick- ing objects up from that element at all is evidently an acquired trick with him. I noticed our Crows about the Museum are very poor hands at picking things off the tank, while the Hooghly Crows were quite handy at water work.

Similarly, the Grand Hotel Crows are very good at catching flying, no doubt owing to constant feeding by residents there. The Crow’s intelligence is of course kept up to a high level by the constant elimination of the young f ook by death or capture ; the old bird knows well the differ- ence between a stick or umbrella and a gun. I have almost touched one with an umbrella and seen another suddenly recollect an appointment to a distant part of Calcutta on catching sight of a gun in my verandah. That a Crow should know a gun when he sees it, or that many birds should have a working acquaintance with the range of that weapon, is not so surprising a fact as might seem at first sight, for we must remember that birds have to learn by experience the appearance of their different natural enemies and the distance at which the proximity of each one becomes dangerous. Our Crow will pull at a kite’s tail, or swoop on its back, out of pure light-hearted- ness and mischief; but he will not play tricks of that kind with a falcon, though he makes no secret of his hatred of the nobler bird. Similarly, I have seen Crows mobbing a tree-civet or toddy-cat, but although they made a great deal of noise, they took care to keep well out of reach ; while with a dog they will go so far, I am told, as to tell off one of the fraternity to pull his tail when he is engaged with a bone, so that when the aggrieved canine turns round to snap, those in front can make off with his dinner.

And this I can readily believe, as T have seen exactly the same trick played or attempted on a kite more than once ; the Crows in the last cases I have observed seemed undoubtedly to be pairs, which accounts for their working together so well. No doubt the female does the tail-pulling, while the male takes the post of danger in front ; in one instance I made sure of this from the forbearing behaviour of the Crow which had snatched the bone of contention^ which he was able to do before any tail- pulling had taken place. I have alluded to the Crows annoying kites by way of recreation, and there is no doubt whatever that this is the object, just as they seem to take pleasure in letting a man come as near them as is consistent with safety But they seem also to have regular games ; at any rate I cannot otherwise account for the habit they have of assembling in the evening and playing what looks very like “I’m the king of the castle “ on the Museum lightning-conductors, for the spiky top of these rods is not a pleasant seat for a Crow ; and yet they are constantly trying to sit on them at this time. The Crow on the whole must have a very happy life. He cannot want for food, for in addition to his natural prey of carrion and insects, he can pick up or steal all sorts of remnants of man’s food; which makes it the more remarkble that his feeding habits are at times so unspeak ably nasty. His enemies, outside man, who does not often get a chance at him, are few ; and that the struggle for existence does not press him very hard seems obvious from the fact that he always has plenty of time to spare in annoying other creatures, from men to lizards. I have heaj-d of a Crow watching one of those reptiles laying and 1 eating up the eggs one by one ! He is indeed a terrible pest to anything that is weak and helpless, though he often meets his match in a most unexpected way. I have seen him soundly beaten by the little spotted (Jove about the last adversary one would expect him to fear but a bad conscience no doubt makes nim a coward.

What are his relations to the Jungle-crow (Corvus mac- rorhynchus) I do not know. Every now and then one hears, even in Calcutta, the provincial accents of this Mo- fussilite, and catches sight of him, easily distinguishable from the urban bird by his greater size and entirely black plumage. Is the smaller bird the master not an un- known case among allied species or is the size of the Jungle-crow a disadvantage to him when flying amongst buildings ? At any rate, one has to get some distance away from Calcutta before one finds the big black Crow at all common. Yet he has a very wide range, from Gilgit where he meets the true raven with which he is some- times confounded, to Siam and Singapore ; and he is also the Crow of the Andamans, so that he must possess considerable powers of adapting himself to circumstances.  But, from the fact that the Himalayan birds are the small- est and those from the Andamans and Burma the largest, we may infer that he likes a hot stuffy climate better than a cool bracing one. It is the other way with the true raven (Corvus cor ax), which is easily distinguished by his greater size and the beard of pointed hackles on his throat, for this bird is largest and finest in the hills and dwindles into a puny race when he lives in the plains ; but he is always considerably bigger than the Jungle-crow.

Our familiar Calcutta friend is mostly confined to India, and to low elevations there, and does not seem to vary much in size, though in the drier parts his neck gets nearly white, and in Ceylon so much darker that it attracts the attention of any one who observes him ; on the Burmese frontier he has a near relative in the Burmese House -crow (Corvus insolens) which is of the same size, but dark-necked and with a different note, but similar in habits. Outside India he has of late years been introduced as a scavenger into Zanzibar, where I first made his acquaintance in the wild state ; but as a sanitary bird he is, in my opinion, much inferior to his hated rival, the kite. Moreover, there are, of course, Crows of other kinds in Africa, as there are in all the large divisions of the world except in South America, where the place of these birds is taken by the carrion hawks, which exhibit in their habits the com- bined rascality of Crow and kite. One of this group can often be seen at Zoological Gardens in the person of the Caracara hawk, a very handsome but cowardly and mis- chievous bird. It will be interesting to see what will hap- pen when Crows at length gain a footing in South America, for some one is sure to introduce them sooner or later, just as our own rook (Corvus frugilegus) at home was lately his trial in South Africa. Of course indiscriminate introduc- tion like this is much to be condemned from the point of view of the practical man, though from that of the naturalist it is of great interest, for future generations of observers will find in it an experiment in evolution.

Crows are certain to have an important influence on the fauna of a country, if only from their cunning arid their Jong life. Whether Hesiod, when he said “ Nine generations lives the croaking Crow ‘ ‘ was strictly accurate is open to considerable doubt ; the oldest Indian Crow I ever knew was at least fifteen and looked as young as ever he could have done. He was in the London Zoo, and I re- member particularly that one very hard winter, although in an out-of-door aviary, he looked about the most cheerful bird in the gardens ; so that if he haunts a warm climate here it is not because he cannot stand a cold one. There is no doubt that he feels the heat very badly, but he probably finds that an easy livelihood has compensating advantages.

I fear, indeed, that things are made too easy for him, for he is no doubt a deadly enemy to many smaller and more attractive birds, besides being a great nuisance to ourselves by his noise and pilfering, in which latter pur- suit he will become appallingly impudent. When I used to encourage Crows, I remember one coming into my room after chota-hazri, taking a couple of mouthfuls out of the butter on my plate, and staying to wipe his beak on a pam- phlet that lay handy before he sought the top of the jillmill ! When you give him an inch he will take an ell, and my policy towards the Crows was one of war to the knife, for I think one pair to a compound is a fair working average. The Crows knew it, too, I think, for I was not popular with them ; but for all that I would be the last to advocate the entire extermination of such a polished scoundrel as Corvus splendens.