Corvus cornix x corone

About

Hooded × Carrion Crow very interested

Hooded × Carrion Crow is a hybrid species very common in Eastern Germany. There is a pretty clean line between Eastern and Western Europe for where which of the species is usually found. East Germany is right on the border, thus there has been a big population of these mixed crows living here for a long time. Read a paper on it if you like.

If you see a crow in East Germany, it is more often than not one of those hybrids who share color traits from both species. Their breast and back are usually light grey, head and wings are black. They tend to be darker than Hooded Crows, while those tend to have a lighter beak. But color alone won't get you anywhere with identifying those clever guys, some are plain black but can be told apart from pure Carrion Crows by the length of their tail feathers and shape of their beak. Or so people say - I can't do it. I just know, that in my part of the country, just about every other crow, or so it seems, is a hybrid.

Sam says

There seem to be two different ways these crows like to live. In parks they usually gather and live in large groups, while in districts in the middle of a city or town, on roofs and backyard trees, they stay on their own as a couple (more scientifically a mating pair), raise some kids together and sometimes move on to a new living quarter. I have been feeding two of them for the last year and before that, I fed their parents. (Hybrids generally aren't easily able to breed. However I swear, those do. I don't know what the numbers are on that.)

One time one of my crows broke a wing and I was very worried, it would die on the roof it was trapped on until that wing would heal but its partner came back all the time to nurse it back to health. The crow eventually learned to fly and glide with the crookedly healed wing. Given that the recent generation is their offspring, they succeeded very well in raising them.

They love peanuts and dried fruit but I've seen them feed on brokkoli, fries, crisps and a lot of things they just find around town. When they were still being raised and taught how to get around by their parents, they killed a bunch of smaller birds once, but didn't feed on them. While I have seen crows in the park feed on snails and insects, the ones living on roofs aren't a big fan of those. It is reported that most birds don't do well with being fed bread and most likely neither do they, but these crows usually stash it away for hard times, should they ever come. Sunflower seeds and oats however won't be touched, no matter how hard the times actually are.

They like to sleep in a warm corner of the roof, rather than on trees. But all of these traits could be special to the ones that were raised near my balcony and not a universal thing, so I'm putting these observations separate from the information on the species itself.

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