I can’t confirm “befriending” crows, but I can confirm that you can make them your enemy.
A while back I had found what I thought was an injured bird. I captured it and brought it to a rehabilitation center for wild birds.
Turns out I had just capture a baby crow that hadn’t learned to fly yet, which explains why there were two other crows (parents) barking at me from trees as I tried to capture their chick.
After the rehab center verified I had not injured the chick during capture they let me return it where I found it.
Let me just say the parents were not happy with me when I let that chick out of the box they started divebombing me.
I had my own baby about a month later and as I was carrying my kid in from the parking lot I got dive Bombed by a crow.
I’ve always thought it was one of the parents retaliating.
From that point on every time they saw me they would start barking at me
You are almost certainly actually right, the crows knew you and were pissed. It can get very bad, the crows whose child you stole can somehow tell all the other crows who you are too, even city-wide, and they can get very aggressive. You have gotten off easy so far.
Crows are incredible. And yeah, you can definitely make friends with them too. This Harper's article has some amazing stories of people making enemies, and also really touching stores of friendship.
> From then on, each time Adam or Dani walked onto their back deck, a crow would call out and the murder would reappear as if summoned, squawking so loudly that it was impossible to carry on a conversation. Sometimes the crows would dive-bomb them or attack Mona when she went out to pee. When Adam took the dog for a walk, the crows swooped low and followed them. He tried walking Mona in other neighborhoods, but the crows terrorized him there too. Adam and Dani felt under siege. They worried for Lina’s safety. “The crows are like the Mafia,” Dani told me a few weeks into their ordeal. They’d stopped going outside, she said, unless it was absolutely necessary. And because of the pandemic, they couldn’t really go anywhere else.
> The day Dani rescued Mona from the crows, a neighbor thought he’d spotted a fledgling in Mona’s mouth before the murder first descended. Dani and Adam weren’t so sure—they had never seen Mona attack a bird before. But it nevertheless occurred to them that they might be on some kind of crow hit list. Through online research, Adam learned that crows have an uncanny ability to recognize humans, assign them moral qualities, and pass this information on to other crows, even to future generations. Desperate, Adam took to Reddit. If you’re at war with the crows, post after post advised, your best option is to move.
Once I was walking atop a mountain that is heavily populated with ravens at certain times of year. I looked over and noticed one was doing some aerial acrobatics. To my astonishment, it was holding a fairly large rock that it was using as a counterweight that it could spin against. When it landed, it dropped the rock and I tried to find it. I'm not 100% sure I found the right rock, but I estimate that the rock was somewhere between a quarter and half a pound. As much as I appreciated the bird's dexterity, it was a bit scary to think of the damage it could do if motivated.
A while back I had found what I thought was an injured bird. I captured it and brought it to a rehabilitation center for wild birds.
Turns out I had just capture a baby crow that hadn’t learned to fly yet, which explains why there were two other crows (parents) barking at me from trees as I tried to capture their chick.
After the rehab center verified I had not injured the chick during capture they let me return it where I found it.
Let me just say the parents were not happy with me when I let that chick out of the box they started divebombing me.
I had my own baby about a month later and as I was carrying my kid in from the parking lot I got dive Bombed by a crow.
I’ve always thought it was one of the parents retaliating.
From that point on every time they saw me they would start barking at me