Crowcore

For two hundred years, the magpie has been framed for theft.

Crowcore, the internet's love of black feathers, small skulls, old keys, and older books, took its look from the crow family and its reputation along with it: thief, omen, witch's familiar, bird of the battlefield. Folklorist Amelia Wren goes looking for the truth behind the gossip and finds the real birds stranger than the stories.

Crows learn the face of a person who trapped them and teach other crows to scold it. Jays plant oak woods by forgetting where they buried the acorns. A New Caledonian crow bends wire into a hook, a carrion crow counts out loud to four, and one Vancouver crow tried to fly off with a knife from a crime scene. Then there is a Seattle girl who kept the gifts her crows left on the feeder, each labelled in its own bag.

A seventeenth-century cabinet of wonders holds two black-and-white ravens from the Faroe Islands, a bird collectors hunted until the last was seen in 1902. Closer to home, Wren shows how to befriend the crows on your street, tell a rook from a crow, and build a cabinet of your own without breaking the law.

The magpie, for the record, is innocent.