Category Archives: Corvid health

Crow curiosities: Why their feet don’t freeze

With a peanut visible in my gloved hand, we square off.  The crow eyes me from its snow covered perch, weary of such gifts offered by strangers.  Above us a raven castes a disinterested look, croaks, and flies away.  I toss the nut into an empty parking space and the crow descends to quickly collect its prize.  The space between us must be widened before it will comfortably eat however, so I decide to leave the crow to its snack and return to my car.


Scrunching my feet in my shoes, I’m relieved for the excuse to retreat.  It’s about 10˚F outside and despite the wool socks and insulated boots between my skin and the snow I can tell that my feet are numb from the cold.  Even stashed in my pocket, my gloved hands are having trouble articulating to their full range.  How is it that my extremities lose function even with so much coddling and yet the crows can continue using their bare toes to steady and manipulate food in such cold weather?

To be clear, birds are endothermic, or warm blooded, just like mammals.  In fact, on average, birds run a little hotter than mammals.  And their feet, like ours, requires warm blood both to function and to prevent the tissues from outright freezing and causing cell death.  Yet despite these needs birds can comfortably walk, stand, or even sleep on ice.


Glassy ice makes cold footing!

To do so, they can take advantage of two important adaptations.   The first is that the size of the arteries carrying blood into the legs and feet is exceedingly small.  Given this high surface to volume ratio, the blood has already lost most of its heat by the time it reaches the feat, and can’t lose much more to the outside world.  The second is that they employ what’s called a counter current heat exchange system.  Essentially, warm blood traveling away from the core and towards the feet via the arteries comes into close contact with colder blood traveling away from the feet and towards the core via the veins. At this point of contact, heat from arterial blood is transferred to blood traveling in the veins. This heat exchange system allows for the tissues in the feet receive just enough heat to prevent cell death, and can reduce heat loss by up to 90%1.


A crow wades out across a frozen Drumheller Fountain in search of scraps

As an additional strategy, you’ll see them protecting their exposed legs under their body feathers, as if they’re incubating them.  This is the same reason you often see winter birds standing on one leg.  By switching back and forth, birds can minimize overall heat loss by reducing the exposure to only a single leg.


A crow covers its feet while it waits (hopes) for a handout

So while I need special clothing to keep my extremities at a similar temperature range to my core, the physiology of most birds is adapted to simply allowing extremities to exist at near ambient temperatures with no tissue damage.  In other words, rather than crows’ feet not getting cold, their feet simply are cold.  That said, frostbite is still a possibility even in birds, particularly for: nonnative species, birds in wire cages, birds with metal legbands, and birds in unseasonably cold conditions.  If frost bite occurs, early treatment at a rehab facility can prevent long term damage2.

Still, the idea that cold-adapted birds can keep their hearts beating away at around 105˚F even while their feet are exposed to freezing temperatures is marvel of adaptation and thermoregulation!


Literature cited:

  1. Elphick C, Dunning JB Jr., Sibley DA (eds).  (2001) The Sibley guide to bird life and behavior.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf
  2. Wellehan JFX. (2003). Frostbite in birds: Pathophysiology and treatment.  Compendium 25: 776-781


Filed under Corvid health, Crow behavior, Crow curiosities

Saving the rarest crow
















Literature cited




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New research on the cause of the AKD outbreak

Since the nineties, Avian Keratin Disorder has been an increasingly common disorder among Alaskan and PNW crows, chickadees (~17% of northwest crows1, ~6% of black-capped chickadees2) and a handful of other species, that causes gross deformities of the beak such as elongation, curvature or crossing.  I’ve written previously about the details of this disease before, but at that time there was little progress in determining the underlying source of the outbreak.  While AKD can be caused by a variety of things, at the scale it’s being observed now scientists questioned if there was a more consistent underlying factor.  Since AKD can cause discomfort or even death (primarily through the inability to feed or preen) understanding what might be the source of this outbreak has clear management and conservation implications.


An AKD-afflicted American crow in Seattle, WA.

Among the initial suspects were environmental contaminants such as heavy metals, organic pesticides, and toxic environmental pollutants like PCBs, PCDDs, and PCDFs.   Blood work done on afflicted Northwestern crows, however, showed no significant difference in the 30 blood elements tested compared to unaffected adults or juveniles3.  Fortunately, new research may finally be shedding light on what’s going on.

Disease can be an easy thing to rule out if you know what you’re looking for, but new to science pathogens can evade traditional diagnostic techniques.  To account for this, a team of USGS and university scientists conducted a sequencing study comparing pooled RNA of healthy and AKD positive chickadees, crows and nuthatches in attempt to identify a candidate pathogen2.  Their work appears to have paid off, revealing evidence for a new picornavirus (a family of viruses previously known to science) they are calling poecivirus.  Whereas 100% of AKD-affected birds (23 subjects) tested positive only 22% of the 9 control individuals did.


Alaskan black-capped chickadee with severe AKD. Photo c/o Martin Renner

Given these small sample sizes, it’s too early to throw our hands up in complete relief of having identified the cause of the AKD outbreak, especially since there’s still much to be done in understanding the potential relationship of this new virus to the environment.  Nevertheless, these findings offer some insight and hope that scientists are on the right track.  With more dedicated work we may soon have a much better understanding of this novel pathogen, its link to AKD, and management options moving forward.

Literature cited

1.  Van Hemert C, & Handel CM. 2010.  Beak deformities in Northwestern crows: Evidence of a multispecies epizootic.  The Auk 127: 746-751.  doi:

2. Zylberberg M, Van Hemert C, Dumbacher JP, Handel CM, Tihan T, and DeRisi JL. 2016. Novel picorn associated with Avian Keratin Disorder in Alaskan birds.  mBio 7 doi: 10.7589/2015-10-287

3. Van Hemert C, Handel C. 2016.  Elements in whole blood of Northwestern crows (Corvus caurinus) in Alaska USA: No evidence for an association with beak deformities.   Journal of Wildlife Diseases 52:713-718 doi:


Filed under Birding, Corvid health, Crow curiosities, Crow disease, Crow life history, Ecosystem, Uncategorized

5 reasons to leave baby crows alone 

Those blue eyes, that awkward gate, their seemingly constant precariousness, they’re all calling to you to intervene. Here are 5 reasons second guessing that instinct might be in the bird’s best interest.


1) The vast majority don’t need your help. It’s totally normal for baby crows to be on the ground and flightless as long as they’re covered with feathers and appear otherwise alert and mobile. Even nestling crows are usually on the ground on purpose. Not because they are ready, but because their parents have intentionally rejected them for one reason or another. They will die an that’s ok. Part of coexisting with wildlife is giving them the agency to be wild. The story is different of course for species where the survival of individuals may mean the difference between population survival and extinction, especially because these situation are almost always driven by human activity.

2) It’s hard to tell when they’re stressed.  Recently, I saw a video on Facebook of a Steller’s jay fledgling in the care of a very well intentioned good samaritan.  She was giving it gentle strokes with her fingertips, each touch resulting in the young bird turning its head towards its back and opening its mouth.  The comment thread filled with ooo’s and awww’s and general comments of encouragement or gratitude for her actions.  For me it was like watching an alien attempt to care for a human child, the child recoiling and screaming while its caretakers congratulated themselves on how kind they were being.  Having handled baby corvids before, I know what that kind of posturing means, it means “I’m scared and stressed.”  To an untrained eye though, it may not look much different than the kind of gaping that means ‘feed me.’  Being stressed to death is a reality for young, or even adult animals, so any handling best be done by experts whenever possible.


3) It’s illegal to rehab crows without a license. You can provide temporary care until you can get them to a licensed facility, but do not attempt to rehab them on your own.  Mistakes like the one I just described are a prime example of why the law seeks to protect animals by ensuring they are only raised or rehabilitated by experts.  For more information on how to handle them until you can get them to a facility visit my previous post.

4) Imprinted crows do not survive well in the wild.  Even if baby crows are receptive to being treated like a pet, doing so is both a legal violation and I would argue a violation of their right to be a wild animal with a healthy fear of people.  Of all my daydreams, at the top of the list is having a wild but imprinted crow that follows me around.  I even have a name picked out.  This fantasy of mine will forever remain just that, however, because it’s too dangerous to allow a crow to become that comfortable with people.  All it would take is one cranky neighbor with a pellet gun and it would be over.  Not to mention being imprinted on people, instead of crows, denies them access to skills and relationships with other crows that will help them survive into adulthood.

pet crow

Killing them with kindness is a real risk.

5) It may do more harm than good.  The conventional wisdom suggests “well, worse case scenario is I try and rehab this baby crow and it dies, which it would have done anyway so really, nothing’s been lost.”  The more we study death in social animals the more we are beginning to realize there may be a cost to prematurely removing ailing or dead animals from their groupmates, however.  Being able to interact with their dead may serve an important role for social animals, and denying them this opportunity may have serious implications in their ability to process that death.  So be thoughtful about how slim the chance of survival is.  It might be that the kindest, most responsible action is no action at all.


Filed under Corvid health, Crow behavior, Crow curiosities, Crow life history, Crows and humans, Uncategorized

Crows with broken beaks













Filed under Corvid health, Crow behavior, Crow disease, Uncategorized