After years of wanting to start befriending the crows that we see in our neighborhood so much (their winter roosting location is visible from our backyard), my daughter and I decided to give it a go this year. Unsalted peanuts in the shell, feed corn, meal-worm nuggets... My husband helped me build a huge feeder out of the kids old swing set. We were all set!

We've had so much fun and, despite neither the little family group that approached us first, nor the greater murder that came after, ever actually eating any of the food that we've put out for them, they seem to really like us. Even the lone raven who is, for some reason a peaceful part of the greater murder, will sit high in our tree or in the farmer's field that backs up to our yard, and croak at me. They'll visit and sit in the backyard trees all around our property, respond to our calls, adjust their flight path to fly over us (sometimes doing a little circle overhead) before heading off to scavenge for the day... One even follows my teen daughter to her bus stop in the morning and just sits in the tree while she waits. She carries a bag of peanuts for it, but it doesn't want our food.

I have one fledgling that I'm pretty sure is part of the original family unit that visited us first- I think this is their normal territory outside of roosting season. I've named him Hermes and he's just full on adopted me but still keeps a good 15-20 ft distance. He'll sit in a tree in the mornings and wait for me to go out and clean up the feeder and refill it before giving me a special three-caw call that I use when I put food out, exactly mimicked down to my intonation, doing a little flyby over me, and going off to scavenge. It's like he's my little sentry, watching over so I can safely get to the feeder or something? 

He also loves playing mimic games. He'll caw a set number of times and go silent, waiting for me to do it back. If I do and then caw back a different number of times, he'll mimic me back and then give me a new number. Until he gets bored. If the weather is nice, he'll fly near our backyard camera and do the three-caw call so I hear him, announcing that he wants me to come outside. Did this 6x one day that was unseasonably warmer than usual. Still won't eat any of the food I put out though. I even put out a plate of meat and they ignored it! My birbs are broken, lol!

Anywho... as you can see from the last photo, if I've posted this correctly (I'm a bit rusty at making reddit posts with photos), I've had some new visitors to what is *supposed* to be my corvid feeder. They're definitely too big to be standard American crows and don't caw at all! They seem to give off this strange aura of being glad that it's no longer November somehow...

A little about my crows plus new, not-crows at my feeder