Birds of a feather grudge together

An experiment at my alma mater showed that crows have a sharp memory when it comes to people who've harmed them. In other words: I think I found my spirit animal!

Crows can carry a grudge for up to 17 years.

That’s really impressive.

Especially when you consider the average life span for a crow is seven to eight years.

Crows, it would seem, are more than just single-generational haters.

At least that’s the conclusions drawn by a fascinating and slightly hilarious experiment at the University of Washington, which just so happens to be the school I attended. Using an ogre mask and a keen ear, John Marzluff demonstrated that crows have long memories and something of a short fuse for specific people who cross them.

It also – in a somewhat roundabout way – shows why we humans might harbor inclinations for payback when we feel we’ve been harmed. But before we get that far, I need to tell you about these birds.

🔬The experiment 🧪

John Marzluff is a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington, an author and someone who has a special interest in and affection for crows. He’s gone so far as to dub them “black-feathered practitioners of life-long learning.”

In 2006, he set out to find out just how long crows would stay mad.

He did this with a highly technical tool:

That’s a plastic mask.

That’s Marzluff wearing the plastic mask in a screenshot from a UW TV report on the experiment.

While wearing the mask, he went out on campus and captured a total of seven crows.

This was done in broad daylight in full view of the crows in the area.

Now, as you may know a group of crows is known as a murder, but in this case, that is not any foreshadowing.

The captured birds were tagged with a band affixed to their leg and then free.

However, the crows did not exactly move on.

The reason we know this is because periodically over the next 17 years, Marzluff or a member of his research team would don the caveman mask and trudge over to the fountain where they’d be scolded by the crows.

“We learned when they see the mask of the person who had captured them, they go crazy basically,” Marzluff told the UW TV interviewer. “They dive at us and attack and shriek.”

Scolding is not a metaphor.

It’s the term used to describe the aggressive cawing that crows engage in, and any time an experimenter walked by with the mask, it spiked when compared to the reaction to non-mask-wearing pedestrians.

Seven years after the initial abductions, experimenters were scolded by approximately half the crows they encountered. It then began to taper off. However, it wasn’t until 2023 – 17 years after the triggering incident – that Marzluff was able to walk the area in the ogre mask without any of the 16 crows he encountered reacting to his presence.

Crows, it seems, have long memories. Not only that, they are able to communicate a perceived threat to other crows, who not only take note, but echo the alarm.

It’s kind of awesome when you think about it. I’d love it if a murder like that had my back!

😡 Does it qualify as a grudge?

Well first, we need a working definition.

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines a grudge as “a feeling of deep-seated resentment or ill-will.”

Oxford Languages goes a step further: “a persistent feeling of ill-will or resentment resulting from past insult or injury.”

I’ll also throw in a more plain-speaking definition from psychologist Angela Duckworth, who offered that “roughly speaking, a grudge is the opposite of forgiveness” during an episode of her podcast, “No Stupid Questions.”

In this case, the crows demonstrated sustained hostility toward a figure that had committed a clear transgression against members of their community.

Not only that, but the hostility persisted beyond the generation of crows who were subjected to or witnessed the initial abductions.

Yes, I think it’s fair to say that crows are capable of holding grudges, which means they’re absolutely my kind of birds.

“Roughly speaking, a gudge is the opposite of forgiveness.”

— Dr. Angela Duckworth, University of Pennsylvania

❌ Disclaimer: I’m about to make this about me ❌

I have a fairly good memory.

It’s not photographic certainly, but it is — based on my own experiences — better than average.

Over the years, I have used my memory as a filing system for the various instances in which I feel I’ve been harmed or hurt.

I’ve even made it into something of a bit by doing things like expressing my disbelief at the high-school P.E. teacher who logged my height as 4 feet 11 and one-half inches at the end of my ninth grade year.

This did in fact happen, and I have joked that because she refused to round up and list me at 5 feet, I hope she died old and lonely. I didn’t really mean that, though. It’s just a humorous punchline to the story.

Other grudges have been more serious.

More specifically, I harbored a deep resentment against my stepfather after he betrayed my mother and spent through their shared retirement savings. I am not entirely embarrassed about the fact I outlasted the crows on that one, hating my stepfather for a solid 20 years.

I would joke that this grudge and the other, less serious grievances, saying it was evidence that I was ugly on the inside.

Being more transparent, I knew that this wasn’t entirely healthy.

I talked to therapists about it.

I did exercises to try and release or at least dilute the resentment I felt.

This would often times help for a little bit, but pretty soon I’d find myself ruminating again about what my stepfather had done and imagining ways I might get back at him.

When this happened, I would feel like there must be something wrong with me because I had been able to actually let go of those emotions. Twenty years after my Mom divorced my stepfather, I still wanted to scold him in public or — better yet — swoop down and peck at his noggin.

I see it differently now.

I think it’s natural to feel hostility toward someone or something you believe has harmed you.

I think it’s an instinct that is wired deeply within us. Something that can be traced back to our very primitive ancestors when reacting aggressively to threats wasn’t a way of life so much as a strategy for self-preservation.

And when that desire for retribution flares up, I imagine a crow squawking at a rubber-masked intruder. It’s a reaction that I’m having in that moment to the memory of someone who might be a threat.

It’s a remarkable piece of psychological programming in some ways. Something that was probably very useful back when our ancestors first began living in groups.

This feeling doesn’t make me a bad person. In fact, it’s part of what makes me human, and perhaps a little bit of a crow!

REFERENCES

• If you think you can hold a grudge, consider the crow | By Thomas Fuller

  The New York Times | Oct. 28, 2024

• “Crows: Smarter than you think” | A video of a lecture from John Marzloff

• “The Crow Whisperer” | UW TV