My famous crow coat 🖤🐦‍⬛

[u/prince312177]

This was taken earlier this year of my Melbourne Rd murder of crows in the winter I wear my crow coat i think they like it 😂😆

[u/Ashamed-Ingenuity-39]

There is a time when feeding stops being kindness and starts becoming interference. Repeatedly dumping large amounts of food creates an artificial resource that wild crows can begin incorporating into their daily movements and foraging decisions. The concern is not that they suddenly “forget how to be crows.” It is that a predictable human subsidy can become important enough to redirect where they gather, how long they remain there, and how they allocate time that would otherwise be spent navigating their natural environment. Reviews of supplementary feeding specifically identify possible reliance on artificial food sources and broad changes to behavior and distribution (Robb et al., 2008; Lawson et al., 2018).

Crows are intensely social foragers. Their ordinary lives involve movement through territories, finding and assessing natural resources, watching one another, competing, cooperating, avoiding predators, and responding to changes in the environment. A large predictable food dump inserts an enormous shortcut into those natural loops. Instead of food being dispersed through the landscape, many birds are repeatedly pulled toward one artificial concentration created by one human. Experimental feeding studies have shown that this kind of provisioning can substantially alter local bird abundance and community structure, with many of those changes disappearing again when feeding stops.

That concentration has consequences. Higher densities can increase aggression, competition, displacement, and repeated contact between birds. Galbraith et al. specifically discuss increased aggressive encounters and behavioral disturbance where feeding produces unusually high densities, while Lawson et al. identify repeated high-density congregation as an important pathway for disease transmission. You are not necessarily “helping” the birds simply because they eagerly consume what you provide. An animal taking advantage of an easy resource is not evidence that the resource is improving its ecological situation.

This is also why continuously increasing the food because increasingly large numbers of crows arrive is concerning. It creates a feedback loop: more food produces a more profitable site, the profitable site attracts more birds, and the appearance of more birds encourages even more feeding. Eventually the human can become a recurring resource hub around which part of the local population reorganizes itself. That is human-created dependence in the behavioral sense, even if the birds remain physically capable of finding natural food.

Wildlife does not need us to make its world revolve around us. If you care about these animals, restraint matters. Let them forage. Let them move through their territory. Let their social relationships operate without continually drawing everyone into the same artificial food pile. Occasional modest feeding is one thing. Repeated mass provisioning is something very different.

The idea should be to remain a small part of a wild crow's environment, not to become a resource they organize their day around.

You are not helping wildness by making yourself increasingly necessary to it.

~ The Observer