The crow family, corvidae, includes some unmistakable characters. It’s hard to confuse a magpie with anything else. The same goes for a jay. But for every colourful corvid, there are many others whose wardrobes are uniformly funereal.
Distinguishing the predominantly black corvids of Britain and Ireland – carrion crow, rook, raven, chough and jackdaw – usually requires looking beyond the plumage.
Some are more straightforward to identify than others. Take the rook, for example, which is about the same size as a crow and is often seen in the same habitats. The rule of thumb, ‘a rook on its own is a
crow; a crow in a group is a rook’, is best not relied upon.
More dependable is the rook’s grey, featherless face patch, which is unique to the species (though absent in very young birds). A chough isn’t too tricky to identify either. The long, red, down-curved bill and red legs are the giveaway here.
Its highly localised distribution on the west coasts of Wales and Scotland also helps. The jackdaw, meanwhile, is characterised by its small size and two-tone plumage, which is mostly black but draped with a grey hood sporting a black head-cap.
How to tell the difference between crows and ravens
Ravens and carrion crows – both sturdy, glossy, jet-black birds – are perhaps the most difficult to tell apart. This isn’t an issue in Ireland or the north-west of Scotland, where the carrion crow is replaced by the hooded crow, with its characteristic grey waistcoat.
Here, if your corvid is all black and has a fully feathered face, it’s almost certainly a raven. Confusion is more likely in southern Scotland, Wales and England, where the all-black carrion crow is dominant. The most striking difference between them is in terms of size.
Ravens are huge. Weighing as much as 1.5kg – more than double that of a crow – and with a wingspan of up to 1.5m, they are the largest of all the passerines, or perching birds, an enormous group that includes more than half of all avian species.
Which is all well and good if you’re lucky enough to see a raven and a crow side by side or, in the case of a single bird, something to gauge its size by. But that’s often not possible in the field, especially for a bird on the wing. But ravens are not only bigger; they are chunkier, too. With a heavy head and bill, thick neck and barrel chest, they have the physique of a bodybuilder compared to the crow’s sleeker, all-round-athlete look.
Then there is the raven’s playful acrobatic flight, which often involves periods flying upside down and contrasts with the crow’s purposeful style. In flight, the raven’s diamond-shaped tail is also distinctive, as are its raptor-like, fingered wing tips.
If all else fails, wait for it to call. The raven’s deep, throaty, resonant cronk makes a crow’s caw-caw-caw seem almost delicate
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Main image: crow © Getty Images