If you look up, chances are you’ll see one, either flying over or perched on a rooftop. The weathervane atop the spurs of the local church is a popular spot.
Although widespread in Britain, they’re very territorial, often spending their whole lives in the same area. It’s generally considered a sociable bird, especially when compared to its close relative the Rook (when I was a kid I was told, I don’t recall by whom, that the way to tell them apart is simply that if it’s on its own, it’s a crow, but if there’s a lot of them, they’re rooks) but the Carrion Crow can be a sociable bird; in his book The Birds of London (a book which no self-respecting London birder should be without), Andrew Self notes that there are winter roosts in the London area where they number in the hundreds, or even the thousands in some cases. It’s also worth noting that young Carrion Crows have been known to hang around and help their parents to feed the chicks in the next brood.
Like other members of the crow family, they’re intelligent birds as their capacity for complex social arrangements (as shown by the above fact and also that old fable about the crow and the pitcher — unable to get at the water in the pitcher, the crow fills it with stones until the water level rises enough to enable it to drink the water).
They are very similar in nature to other crow species like the Hooded Crow (which used to be considered to be a sub-species of the Carrion Crow), the American Crow (which I’ve seen in Canada) and the Pied Crow (which I remember seeing a lot of on my African travels, two decades ago). Quite why the collective noun for them is a murder of crows is a mystery to me; as the name implies, they do eat carrion and they do sometimes steal eggs, but they eat just about anything and are by nature scavengers, which must go a long way towards explaining why they can happily co-exist alongside people.
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