The Majesty of Crows

Aaron Gilbreath

At 6pm, outside Powell’s Books’ downtown store, a mother of two tugged her small daughter’s hand. “Oh, we’re in crow territory,” she said. “I’ll tell you what that means once we get in the car.” There on 10th Avenue between Couch and Burnside streets, quiet groups of crows perched overhead in the leafless trees. Their black bodies stood stationary and lifeless—like persimmons someone had yet to pick, or Christmas ornaments hung by Beetlejuice. Pedestrians shuffled below, unaware. Two commuters waited at the light rail station, where white crow droppings dotted the street.

Every winter night in Portland, just before sunset, thousands of crows fly in from the suburbs and inner-city neighborhoods to roost downtown. Locals first recorded the great migration in 2013 when a paper reported that “hundreds of crows have taken up residence” near SW Fifth Avenue and Salmon Street. One observer said they had “never seen anything like it.” The citizen science project Portland Crow Roost estimates that between 10,000 and 15,000 birds roost in 70 of downtown’s 400 square blocks, between October and March. In 2017, they counted 22,370 crows—the highest recorded number. Even people with little interest in nature notice the birds. They don’t necessarily know where they come from or what they’re doing. They just see black clouds swarming over bridges, over the Willamette River, and overhead while stuck in traffic—disorienting amounts of crows, all caw-caw’ing and flapping the same northwesterly direction. Many of these people don’t know to close their mouths when they look up.

On the opposite side of downtown, Portland State University students shuffled under the trees in the South Park Blocks. The crows’ raucous cackling was too loud to miss, yet not everyone connected their sound to the voluminous rain of feces. When one pedestrian looked up, something landed on his face. Confused, he wiped it with his jacket sleeve and examined it in the darkness.

“They call groups of crows ‘a murder,’” a man nearby said. “Know why? Because you want to murder them.”

Downtown, crow poop pelts parked cars. It drips off parking meters. It stains sidewalks, benches, steps, walls, newspaper dispensers, statues, ledges, and handrails. The innumerable white splotches vaguely match the white holiday lights that decorate downtown trees, though many locals struggle to see it through such a cheerful lens. It’s disgusting, people say. It’s an eyesore. It’s bad for business. One furniture store employee compared the sound of falling poop on late-night streets to cracking glass: an eerie staccato crack, crack, crack that rings between tall buildings as it hits the pavement, one shower after another. Some locals call sundown Crow Happy Hour. Others call it Crappy Hour. Like it or not, the crow’s nightl flying ritual is one of Nature’s greatest shows, and it’s become enough of a winter phenomenon to stop people in their tracks, where they gawk and take pictures.

Portland is fortunate to host an incredible variety of urban wildlife, with many species appearing in residents’ daily lives. Peregrine falcons nest on bridges. Bald eagles hunt on Ross Island. Newts and salamanders live in the streams that thread the same residential neighborhoods where coyotes trot in the street. Every summer, people turn out to watch Vaux’s Swifts fly into a single chimney to roost. But housing thousands of crows has proven messy, and even Portland’s interminable rain can’t wash away the mess. So the city has tried to manage crow conflicts humanely with high pressure hoses, a sidewalk-scrubbing machine named The Poopmaster 6000, and now trained falcons. Poison is legal but unethical. Instead of eradication, the falcons train these smart birds to roost away from certain business districts and stick to green spaces. That choice has transformed Portland into a shining example of how to peacefully cohabitate with crows.

And then, in spring, the crows disappear, heading to their summer breeding grounds, and the nightly show ends.

This relationship has ancient roots.

When human beings first crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia into North America 14,000 or so years ago, ravens probably traveled across the bridge with them, but a group of crows and ravens had already arrived between 2 and 4 million years ago.

In this new land, those early humans were, to some extent, competing with those birds—mainly ravens. Ravens lived as scavengers on the kills of large Ice Age carnivores like the short-faced bear and American lion. As carnivores ourselves, those early people filled a similar role in the new North American ecosystem, killing big game like caribou and muskox, and fighting off—or sharing with—those black birds.

Although ravens and crows both lived along what became the Pacific Northwest coast, they preferred different habitats. Ravens favored dense forests. Crows stuck to open spaces, particularly along the coast between the high tideline and the forest. Crows love edges. There along the edge of the forest and the ocean, crows scavenged accessible detritus that washed up on shore—dead animals, small sea creatures, plant matter—as well as bivalves and small fish, so early people would have interacted with them.

“The crow has always been an edge species,” says John Marzluff, Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. “That coastal edge let them tap both resources. They could go into the forest and grab bird eggs and young birds, and they could go to the other side and find washed up dead animals and small sea animals. They probably nested in the forest’s edge, too, because they do nest in trees.”

A renowned researcher and expert in the family of birds known as corvids, Marzluff has written extensively about them in his books Gifts of the Crow and In the Company of Crows and Ravens. In their coastal encampments, Marzluff says, Indigenous people interacted with crows, who came to steal a bite to eat. But Indigenous people would have interacted more closely with the more numerous ravens, who flapped around their large forest villages and kill sites, vying for meat. “That’s why a lot of those stories involve ravens, specifically,” says Marzluff. “This is why the crow doesn’t fit into their mythology nearly to the extent that the raven do.” That said, many tribes mix crow and raven in their stories, sometimes making it difficult to discern which bird they’re talking about.

Indigenous people didn’t see these birds as malevolent influences or a bad omen. For the Indigenous Kalapuyan bands who inhabited the future site of Portland, coyotes, not birds, were their major character. Other tribes respected the birds as nosy, mischievous neighbors—a common presence in daily life, like the rain. The Makah in Washington revered them while also defending against them, installing scarecrows in their salmon drying racks to keep the birds out of their fish. In coastal British Columbia, the Haida people credited raven with creating humanity itself.

One day, Raven found himself on a deserted beach on the archipelago that he created, named the Queen Charlotte Islands, named Haida Gwaii. When Raven looked down, he noticed a large clamshell at his feet. Tiny creatures peered out from the clamshell but were too scared to emerge. Some versions of this creation story describe the creatures as trapped. In another version, Raven is a she. Raven convinced them to come out into this incredible, bountiful world where they lived, and when they did, these creatures became the Haida people.

In her book Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, Elle E. Clark tells a story she heard on Haida Gwaii:

Long ago, near the beginning of the world, Gray Eagle was the guardian of the Sun, Moon and Stars, of fresh water, and of fire. Gray Eagle hated people so much that he kept these things hidden. People lived in darkness, without fire and without fresh water. … When Raven saw the Sun, Moon and stars, and fresh water hanging on the sides of Eagle’s lodge, he knew what he should do. He watched for his chance to seize them when no one was looking. He stole all of them, and a brand of fire also, and flew out of the longhouse through the smoke hole. As soon as Raven got outside, he hung the Sun up in the sky. It made so much light that he was able to fly far out to an island in the middle of the ocean. When the Sun set, he fastened the Moon up in the sky and hung the stars around in different places. By this new light he kept on flying, carrying with him the fresh water and the brand of fire he had stolen. He flew back over the land. When he had reached the right place, he dropped all the water he had stolen. It fell to the ground and there became the source of all the freshwater streams and lakes in the world. Then Raven flew on, holding the brand of fire in his bill. The smoke from the fire blew back over his white feathers and made them black. When his bill began to burn, he had to drop the firebrand. It struck rocks and hid itself within them. That is why, if you strike two stones together, sparks of fire will drop out. Raven’s feathers never became white again after they were blackened by the smoke from the firebrand. That is why Raven is now a black bird.

In 2024, thousands of years after the dawn of the world, Americans have turned the Northwest’s dense coniferous forests into farms and cities, which has favored crow over raven. Crow now operates as a kind of avian coyote, whose intelligence, risk-taking, and adaptability have allowed it to thrive, rather than shrink, around people.

When crows first started roosting downtown in 2013, they may have numbered around 6,000. It was hard to tell. Nobody was systematically counting yet. The crows gathered on the ledges of the Multnomah County Courthouse. They gathered on the ornate arched roof of the historic Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, above the famous lighted Portland sign. Their proud, outstretched chests silhouetted against the moon around Pioneer Square. Crows spread useful information quickly, telling others the location of food, danger, and available territories. As word spread, family and friends kept flocking downtown to enjoy everything these sociable omnivores needed: warmth, gossip, light to spot predators, a reliable food supply, easy nesting opportunities, shelter from winter weather, a relative lack of predators, and access to outlying areas.

“Crows want to be in as big of a group as possible for safety reasons,” says Professor Marzluff. “In groups, they can look out for predators, mostly owls, and avoid being the one bird who gets picked out. To be in a big group, you have to sleep in a place that birds from many different areas can come into without traveling excessive distances. In Portland, those centralized conditions are downtown.”

In late 2017, two Portlanders heard rumors about crows roosting downtown. “As corvidophiles, we became increasingly interested in the afternoon arrival of crows in downtown Portland,” wrote Gary Granger and Rebecca Provorse. “On a cold November night, after a dinner downtown, our curiosity overcame our desire for warmth and we took a late-night walk. The result was a hand-drawn map of several blocks of the city and scribbled numbers totaling 3,705 roosting crows. We were hooked.” They formed the group Portland Crow Roost that year and started walking downtown streets, counting the roosting crows and creating a detailed living document of this unique annual migration. They weren’t scientists by profession, but they were interested enough in this unusual phenomenon that they wanted to experience it as well as document it for the greater good. The more locals knew about the crows, they figured, the more people might want to protect them. At that point, the crows needed allies.

Portland’s crows tore insulation from walls. They gathered on roofs and woke hotel guests with their caws. During a huge 2017 snowstorm, Portland Police Criminalist Walker Berg snapped an enchanting photo from the Justice Center’s 12th floor. In the clean white tops of trees in the neighboring park, the black dogs of thousands of crow bodies appeared against the backlit glow. But other downtown workers grew tired of cleaning crap off their cars.

Every summer, Portlanders hung out in a park to watch thousands of Vaux’s Swifts fly into a single brick chimney to roost each night. Swifts were magical, a spectacle. But the crows? They divided people. In 2014, one anonymous Portlander poisoned some to get rid of them. Approximately 30 dead crows turned up in downtown parks. People found agonized birds seizing on the ground. Others fall from the sky. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 protects crows and other native birds, making it a federal crime to poison them. Unfortunately, authorities didn’t catch the perpetrator. In 2018, more poisoned birds fell from the sky in Northeast Portland. Forensics determined that Avitrol, a commercially available neurotoxin, caused both mass murders.

In 2019, the Portland City Council unanimously banned the class of bird poisons known as avicides on city property. Portland didn’t administer avicides anyway, but it wanted to send a message to the feds and other municipalities: poisoning birds is inhumane, even if it’s legal. “These kinds of poisons are completely inappropriate for use in the city,” said Portland Audubon Society conservation director Bob Sallinger. “They’re indiscriminate, they are cruel and inhumane, they are dangerous and they don’t belong in our environment.” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler agreed. “I think we are being very naïve,” Wheeler said, “foolish even—if we think using neurotoxins on wildlife won’t eventually impact us as humans.” Portland found ways to deal with animal nuisances.

In 2016, Downtown Portland Clean & Safe, a nonprofit that addresses downtown security and cleanliness, bought a sidewalk-scrubbing machine named The Poopmaster 6000. It was less effective than they’d hoped. Pressure washing only addressed the symptoms, too, not the source of the issue. “We would pressure wash all night,” Lynnae Berg, executive director of Downtown Clean & Safe, told The Oregonian. “And then the crows would wake up and it would look like we had done nothing.”

In 2017, Clean & Safe shifted strategies and hired the professional abatement falconers at Integrated Avian Solutions to move crows away from busy business district and the transit mall and into green places, especially along the waterfront. This local company already used birds of prey to scare problematic birds out of trash dumps and wineries. Downtown’s struggling retail stores needed help. Smart enough to learn faces, crows are smart enough to learn to avoid hostile areas, and the Harris hawks have successfully shifted the birds’ roosting behavior out of a certain seven-by-ten block.

Public complaints have decreased. The crows stay on the right side of the boundaries that the hawks patrol. “We feel like we’ve found the right solution to manage the issue,” Berg said. “We’ve had fewer complaints. People are really satisfied when they see the result.”

Legendary for their social and emotional intelligence, crows are some of the smartest animals on earth. Unlike most mammals, crows use tools. They use twigs to extract grubs from logs. They place nuts on the streets to let the wheels of passing cars cracks the shells for them. They don’t seem to mind if squirrels get hit by cars when eating those nuts, because crows will eat squirrels, too. In studies, crows have learned to use coins to extract food from dispensers. Urban crows can learn intent and will not step out of pedestrians’ way unless that person makes eye contact, because minding their own business around a blasé person will not endanger them, but a person who shows interest may post a threat. Crows also recognize human faces after regular exposure. When they identify individuals who have malicious intent or who have stressed them in the past, they tell the group. That information spreads and often stays for generations, long after the original crow who learned this had died. This is called cultural transmission. The rumor is that if you feed the same crows long enough, they will recognize you as a friend and might even bring a gift as thanks for your kindness.

A local second grader wanted to know what kind of gifts did they give? “I know it’s not Calico Critter type gifts,” she told her father after feeding her crows one morning, “but what do they like?” Maybe sparkly stuff, he said, or things that shine, like coins, keys, bottle caps, buttons, jewelry, and paperclips. “If they gave you a gift,” she said, “could it be my gift too?” Of course, her dad said. It also worked the other way: Show crows aggression, and they will always avoid you, leaving a hole in your heart in their absence.

All over Portland, residents feed neighborhood crows. They leave bowls of cereal. They toss packaged bird seed and test combinations of dried fruit, cracked corn, and nuts. Standing at a safe distance or behind house windows, they watch what they call “their crows” pecking the grass, trying to distinguish one from another. Were the birds on their garage this morning the same birds as last week? Did these repeat visitors consider them human friends? One crow on the girl’s street had a limp. Watching that bird eat peanuts in her safe, sheltered driveway, the girl said, “I want to help that poor bird, scoop it up, put her in a box, take her to the vet, and make her a bed where she can rest.”

One reason people respond to crows is because they’re accessible. People naturally have them in their yards, so establishing a relationship is easy. Unlike songbirds, who fly away at our approach, and unlike seagulls, raptors, and waterfowl, who we mostly see flying or perched overhead, crows get on the ground with us. Instead of existing high in a kind of different world, crows will walk around us—at a park, on a sidewalk. “That’s different,” says Marzluff.

Another reason people respond so strongly to crows is that they’re readable. “They come up to you,” says Marzluff, “they look at you. You have a sense that they’re paying attention to what you’re doing. They might be challenging you in some way, taking things that you don't want them to take, or pooping where you don't want them to poop. So they are kind of in your face, and they are relevant to what you’re doing. The birds at a bird feeder—they’re really engaged with what you’re doing. Those birds are not in your garbage, they’re not in your garden, they’re not on your front porch. But I think the thing that really gets people is the way that crows will stop and look at you and pay attention to you—and almost be begging from you.” This is what happens in the city. Strutting around our car, walking behind us—we find their behavior curious and interesting. “We feel like we’re kind of a part of it,” Marzluff says. As they watch us, they learn from us. This is more than a relationship. This is what scientists calls coevolution, and it dates back to the time when people settled what became the Pacific Northwest.

In North Portland, one woman spent months building a relationship with her birds. One of her friends had unwittingly become the crows’ enemy when she found herself too close to a crow who got hit by a car. For years after, the crows dive bombed her. When two crows started coming around this woman’s property, she tried to stay on their good side.

Each morning this woman enjoys her coffee in her backyard, and at night, she sips wine. The smaller of the two crows had a scar on her beak and the back of her head was nearly bald from molting. She spoke softly to them while gardening, avoided sudden movements. If she happened to have peanuts or cat food, she tossed a handful in the driveway, but it was casual. This summer, she noticed a group in her yard drinking from the water bowls she filled for other critters. The group kept their distance at first, flying to a nearby rooftop to watch her scatter treats. After courting the hesitant female, a family of four to six birds started swooping down from a stand of trees to feast on treats near the water bowl, keeping the woman company during her backyard time. This became their routine.

Over the summer, she added crow treats to her grocery list. She tested combinations of ingredients, expecting to find clear favorites. Almonds, walnuts, dry chicken flavored cat food—they ate everything. The small adult seemed to be the mother. This bird stayed after the satiated others flew away. Weeks of daily interactions had built enough trust that, one August morning, the mother spent 20 minutes perched a few feet away, as the woman drank her coffee. Everything changed.

Week after week, the birds inched closer to her seat. They quit scattering when she stood up. When she came outside in the morning, they were waiting. After eating, they lingered. They even brought their babies. “It makes me feel very special,” she said.

She came to admire their big personalities. They’re curious and clever. They hid treats just to find them, and the more effort it required, the better. The adults were vigilant and serious, the juveniles playful and silly. She watched them learn to bark like the dogs at the neighboring dog park. She watched them band together against a common enemy and to identify a friend. She admires their intellect, values their individuality, and appreciates getting to know them in a way you can’t know backyard songbirds. She knows these birds would survive without her, but they’ve chosen to make her part of their routine. “The crows give me the time of day, and that’s such a gift,” she says.

Many people who befriend crows experience a profound sense of connection—not just with the birds, but with them as the embodiment of natural forces at large. This isn’t about having the power to get a flock of birds to swoop down at your command. Look, I control nature! This is about intimacy and trust, about building relationships on kindness and generosity, on cooperation not competition—traits that our modern urban lives so often lack. “I know how easy it is to lose their trust,” the woman said, “I feel really honored to have earned it instead.” She was surprised how much these relationships have pulled on her heartstrings. “It’s also probably the best thing that’s happened for my mental health in my entire adult life. If I’m feeling sad or stressed or overwhelmed, spending 20 minutes watching crows eat snacks is the perfect antidote.” She works downtown, and she’s fortunate that her desk sits eye-level with the trees, because every night, she listens to the crows gossip and wishes she knew what they were saying. “I love it so much,” she says. “I love them.”

At 4:10pm one cold afternoon, not a cloud or bird appeared in Portland’s sky. The snowy tip of Mount Hood glowed in the distance. People raced rental scooters through downtown, and commuters crowded freeways on their drive home.

On that day, December 3, the sun set at 4:27, the city’s earliest sunset of the year. By 4:15, no crows had taken flight, but something about the sun seems to trigger the birds like clockwork, and by 4:20, the gaggle of crows who were roosting at the base of the OHSU tram started to stir, flapping between trees and two buildings’ roofs before streaming north over the elevated freeway interchange.

In North Portland, a small flock flew south across the rush hour traffic on Alberta Street at 4:23—directly over the spot where five crows had pecked at the pavement for food that same morning. Did the cars stuck in traffic know that the birds were part of a great migration, not just some random assemblage blowing in the wind? You only had to look at their precise formations to figure it out, but studying the birds meant risking a car crash.

By 4:28, small to medium-size flocks flew in a line downtown, directly south to north, following the Willamette River. Forming their own feathered stream, the birds passed over the Hawthorne Bridge and the many bicyclists and joggers who raced along the waterfront. Squadrons of waterfowl flew among them, a few individual seagulls. Two crows chased each other in the air. A seal jumped from the River to snatch a fish. The clouds of birds followed the row of trees along Nato Parkway, then disappeared over the tops of buildings into Old Town, toward some unseen destination.

They didn’t just arrive from the north and south. Diffuse groups flew west over the city’s largely treeless Southeast Industrial District, to cross into downtown. They had been streaming through southeastern Portland, following Belmont Avenue, following Interstate 84. The trickles coalesced into a literal black cloud that discolored the eastern sky as they passed directly over the commuter traffic on Interstate 5, over the backed-up cars on the Burnside Bridge, and over the River. So many birds eventually filled the air that they looked like a plume rising from a brush fire. Just when you thought there couldn’t be any more, they kept coming.

At 4:32, this incredible cloud—possibly thousands of crows—gathered over downtown’s famous neon Portland sign, the one with the jumping deer, taking their rightful place as the city’s true icons.

Along Nato Parkway, a fire truck’s siren mixed with a train’s horn and the overhead caw-caw-caw’ing. By 4:45, the frigid air glowed blue, as the sun prepared to set. The crows kept coming, their bodies silhouetted against the lavender sky.

4:50: still coming.

But at 4:52, the voluminous stream stopped. Only cars streamed by now.

This proved to be a pause.

Sixty seconds later the stream resumed, filling the gap between buildings and continuing the current toward Old Town.

By 4:54, the stream had shifted completely west from Nato, leaving the parkway for First Avenue, to stream directly above the city’s temporary ice-skating rink. Under the broad white canopy, ice skaters circled as the birds flew above them, like bats leaving the bridge in Austin, Texas, except making audible noise. Even the most curious pedestrian couldn’t walk fast enough to find out where they were heading. By 4:58 the stream had stopped again, this time for good.

Passengers boarded the light rail at Harvey Milk Street and First Avenue. “I think they roost in the North Park Blocks in Old Town,” one passenger said. “I’m not sure.”

One minute, two minutes, three minutes passed. No more birds. Had they all really just landed somewhere?

As the final sunset glow backlit the golden skyscrapers, the darkness set in. Then one final group appeared: an enormous cloud of crows emerged from between buildings near Clay Street, circled over the grassy waterfront, then disappeared between the buildings again.

Back on Clay Street, downtown’s edge went silent, but signs of crows were everywhere.

Beyond dark underside of the Morrison Bridge, where two houseless men burned wood behind the chain-link fence that was meant to keep them out, white crow droppings covered a historic plaque. “First issue of The Oregonian printed here December 4, 1850,” the marker said, “from a waterfront shack in this vicinity.” The plaque took the shape of the state of Oregon. It and the surrounding vintage brick were covered in crap. Someone had pitched a large blue tent and parked their shopping cart on a bed of sycamore leaves, and syringes lay on the sidewalk between abandoned pants and a pair of muddy shoes.

On Clay Street, the Marriott Hotel front desk clerks didn’t know where the crows roosted at night. “I’ve heard that crows recognize human faces,” said the playful clerk with the Canadian accent. “If you’re a jerk to a crow, don’t be surprised when crows you don’t know are jerks back to you.” Maybe the birds had settled in the North Park Blocks by now. Maybe some in the South Park Blocks, too, by PSU.

The nearby parking lot attendant had no info either. “The what? The crows?” She sat inside a glass box between ticketing machines, talking to someone on a video call on her phone. “I’m just in here from 8am to 6pm. I heard about ’em, but I haven’t seen ’em. Why, what’s going on?” Nothing’s going on, no need to worry. She laughed. “Good! I don’t hear nothing! I just do my job, stay in here, make sure ya’ll get in and out safely.”

Further up Clay Street, ten blocks from the River, the clerk at the Middle Eastern minimarket had nothing to say about the crows who sometimes roosted on the green wooded blocks outside his shop. “I know nothing,” he said. He shook his head when asked again, before pointing for the customer to enter their pin into the credit card reader to pay for their halva.

The December air numbed human fingers and bit your neck. People in fancy clothing ate inside Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, while homeless men sat on park benches under the trees where crows used to roost. Where were they now? How can thousands just disappear? Tents, empty store fronts, smashed car windows—busy as it was, downtown at night had an unsettling edge. Pedestrians pulled hoods over their heads, giving harmless innocents a nefarious air when they sank their hands in their pockets. Depending on your worldview, the crows either infused this place with majesty or menace.

Working at the Portland State University library since 2016 hasn’t soured the 39-year-old librarian on the crows. Instead, her location had turned her into a self-described crow nerd who takes videos of crows to send to other crow nerds. It helps that she parks her car in a covered parking garage that shields it from the poop. “In other parts of town, I’m very careful about parking under a tree,” she said. Despite the noise the birds make outside her library, she has no complaints about them, only love. “They do sometimes bully the squirrels,” she said. “Sometimes they can be a little mean to pigeons, too, but I think it’s because crows are so smart.” Smart enough to wait around garbage cans and snatch food from scavenging squirrels’ paws. Leaving the library one night, she encountered a crow trying to open student’s food. “So I walked up to it very carefully, took the granola bar, and undid the wrapper, then gave the crow back the bar. The crow treated me like, Oh, that’s exactly what you should have done. It was only polite for me to help! I haven’t received any treats as payment, but I know I did a good deed for the crow.”

On this night, at 5:45, a line of people outside Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall waited to see Christian musician Michael W. Smith perform. The short-haired pacing security guard had seen the swirling crows countless times. “Two weeks ago they were in the trees on Clay Street, in that park across from Keller,” she said. “Masses of them. When I seen them, it was overwhelming. It was electric.” If they had roosted atop the Schnitz in the past, the clean concertgoers should be grateful they weren’t there to poop on them now.

Instead, many birds had claimed the trees throughout the Pearl District.

North of Burnside Street, around Powell’s Books and Whole Foods, pedestrians strolled the polka-dotted streets beneath hundreds of crows. A few birds made strange sounds above the people paying for street-side parking. Softly, they cooed, they rattled. They made guttural clicks, throat warbles, and a kind of plastic gurgle—all much more soothing than their territorial caw. Some listeners compare crow sounds to human babies. To others, their sounds have no equal. That’s part of what makes them both creepy and miraculous. But unlike during their sunset migration, they had now mostly quieted down.

A nervous pigeon ignored a flattened muffin to peck at some droppings beneath a tree. Nearby, sixty-one crows perched in a single leafless tree outside an athletic clothing store. The bigger trees probably had three times as many, but the leaves concealed them.

Sixty-eight crows perched in one tree outside a nearby sushi restaurant. It was one of many trees lining these streets. “I love the crows,” one waitress said. “They make me happy.” Outside her restaurant, the sound of wet droppings splattered on the pavement.

Only six crows perched in a small tree outside of the Anthropologie clothing store. Across the street, inside the CB2 home decor store, one employee’s love of crows far outweighed the presence of the single crow that perched outside his front door.

When he first moved to Portland in 2017, he asked a long-time resident what he should know about life here. The friend listed the usual touristy stuff: the Coast, the Gorge, popular restaurants. Then they added: “The crows suck.” This employee had worked at this store since it opened in July 2022, and after three seasons with the crows, he couldn’t disagree more.

“I personally love the crows,” he said. “My family loves the crows. My daughter has crows tattooed on her back and legs. They are majestic.”

Wearing crisp cream-colored slacks and an earpiece, he folded his hands behind his back while greeting customers. Holiday piano music filled the festive, bright store, where tinsel and Christmas decorations sparkled around high-end sofas and tables.

Sure, the birds can be noisy and messy, he explained. “But they are great animals.” Every evening in spring and summer, his wife puts shelled raw peanuts in their suburban yard, and a few crows show up. Although they aren’t certain that these are the same crows, and they’ve never received gifts, they believe they are the same, and that felt good.

Portland is the kind of city where people bring their dogs everywhere, so many businesses allow dogs inside. Portland is also the kind of place that can support a store like GiftyKitty, “The one & only Meowgical everything cat paradise.” The crows’ obvious presence has transformed Portland into a city of crow-lovers, too. “If you’re a farmer, it’s probably a different experience,” said the man in CB2. “Scarecrows are scarecrows for a reason.”

He liked crows’ intelligence, their human-like qualities, and their communal, family nature. As a hard-worker in a tough, concrete environment, crows’ resolve spoke to him. Raising children, trying to put food on the table, commuting from the burbs to downtown each day for work—life is a struggle. Every day, he does this, and everyday the crows do, too. “They’re not violent or malicious,” he said. “They’re just making it out there like all of us are trying to do, and they’re successful.”

Regal and forever out of reach, another part of their appeal comes down to the ethereal connection that sociobiologist E.O. Wilson calls “biophilia,” which is humanity’s innate affinity for other forms of life. There on his lawn, there outside his store, the crows add a touch of enchantment to everyday existence, something wild in a world of schedules and expectations, something beautiful among the graffiti, endless traffic, and struggling houseless population, something beyond control. Magic retreats at the onset of adulthood. Crows replenish it.

“Along with the crows come the basic bodily functions that all of us have,” he said. “We just do it in a more private manner.”

His voice went soft as he said this. A customer had arrived at the front desk, waiting to ask a question. Before turning his attention to them, he added: “We all poop.”




The next morning, the crows strutted around residential streets again, pecking at insects too small for people to see. They searched piles of leaves with their beaks and flew off as dogs approached on leashes. This is how they spend their days.

Just before sunrise, a crow cloud had flown north above Beach Elementary in the Overlook neighborhood, silhouetted against a pink sky. As commuters warmed in their idling cars before heading to work, other crows flew overhead, commuting to their own livelihoods further afield.

The seven-year-old and her dad tossed peanuts outside their house then watched to see which crows collected them. They tossed nuts on the lawn. They tossed them in the driveway and tossed them on the roof. The father and daughter stood outside beckoning the birds with niceties like, “Here you go!” and “These are you, friends. We love you, crows!” They wanted the birds to learn their faces. They wanted to show they were kind. “Maybe they’ll give us a gift,” the girl said. After a year of feeding, no gifts had appeared, but sharing was a mode of living, not a passing transaction, the father wanted to instill.

One man, named Rich, stopped to talk to the father and daughter. Rich walks the Overlook Neighborhood every day. On one block on Willamette Boulevard, between Concord and Denver avenues, he said, the crows follow behind him, drifting tree to tree like they want something. “It’s kind of eerie,” he says. They may have mistaken him for somebody who had wronged them. They may think he has food. He doesn’t know—because he doesn’t feed them—but the Alford Hitchcock movie The Birds still haunted him decades after seeing it, and now, if he remembers, he avoids this particular block.

Some nights he hangs out at a friend’s house. Once, while leaving, something hit him in the back of the head. “I’m always looking around that time of night, for people and what have you,” he told the girl and father, “but something banged me so hard that it threw me forward.” The force literally pushed him, and he skidded on his feet. He speculated that it was a crow, though he didn’t get a look. Maybe it was an owl? Just that week, a great horned owl dive-bombed a runner in a small urban natural area near Reed College, and the owl’s talons cut this jogger’s head. “I got off light with just a few scratches,” the jogger said online, “but it was terrifying. Be careful if you spend any time down there at night.”

As Rich shared his story, three crows watched from an electric line. When one bird swooped down to pry a nut from a shell that a car had cracked, Rich watched with a jumpy mix of interest and unease. “They’re so smart,” he said. “Glad they’re not strong enough to carry me away.”

Gifts of the Crow and In the Company of Crows and Ravens, John Marzluff, Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington.

Original interview with John Marzluff.

“Iljuwas: Bill Reid Life & Work,” by Gerald McMaster, The Art Canada Institute website.

Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, Elle E. Clark.

Portland Crow Roost website, Gary Granger and Rebecca Provorse.

“Audubon Society investigating mysterious crow die-off, fears poisoning,” Elliot Njus, Oregon Live.

“Portland Audubon investigates after crows start ‘literally dropping out of the sky,’” Genevieve Reaume and Chris Liedle, KATU News.

“Portland Bans Toxic Bird Poisons On City Property,” Cassandra Profita, OPB.

“Latest weapon in Portland's war on crow poop: more birds,” Kale Williams, The Oregonian.

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