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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Yes! This is a heartwarming story. But the opposite is true. If you happen to piss off a crow, your life will become very difficult. You might as well move towns.

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Here in Australia, magpies do something similar but in a bad way. During nesting season they'll swoop you, remember your face, and keep targeting you. My daughter got attacked two weeks ago.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-30/magpie-swooping-seaso...

That makes me wonder: If you happened to piss them off, is there a way to appease them again sort of by redeeming yourself and thereby amend the diplomatic relationship?

I feel like there's gotta be

Have a friend, in a mask, kidnap one of the crows. Then you appear, and set it free, and give it cookies. (And your friend stops using the mask.)

This makes the assumption that crows can identify people only by the face. It's quite likely they could recognise something else.

That is not so much an assumption as a conclusion, backed up by research:

https://urban.uw.edu/news/crows-hold-grudges-against-individ...

https://crowlingo.org/journal/marzluff-mask-experiments-expl...

I think the person meant that it might not be for the mask-wearer. They might be targeted by crows even when the mask comes off because the crows might still recognize them from their walking style or body odor or voice etc.

They explicitly are not able to recognize once the mask comes off. That’s the point.

That's why you use your friend!

Or even better: use a (visiting) tourist.

Mostly face - at least crows. There were experiments done with people in mask, and when they remove the mask - crows would no longer recognize them

There was a story a few years back about a woman who did that. She was a target, so she tried leaving treats, and ended up converting one of the crows to her side and it then came to her defense against other birds.

Yeah this happened to me when I was around 12 years old on my way to school. I spotted the crow one day in the middle of the road and thought it was a raven because it was so big for a crow. Then a car came and I guess it thought I attacked it with the car so it got pissed. Since that day it started attacking me every day as I went to school for about 1-2 years. Nothing too serious though but I had to be on my guard, it would literally position itself right where the sun was so I couldn't really see when it would strike at me if it did - most of the time it just screamed at me 5 meters away.

So we need to research if we can apologize to crows.

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