A Murder of Crows (Susan Fleming, 2009): Canada/France

Reviewed by Nicole Muhlethaler.  Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

A Murder of Crows is a compelling documentary bringing insight to the nature of the crow using creative camerawork, cutting-edge scientific studies, and one of the world’s leading experts on crows, Professor John Marzluff. We are invited to travel the globe comparing different crow species, watch new scientific experiments, and observe the natural behavior of these fascinating creatures in action.

The opening of the film gives us some basic crow facts – they are found wherever humans live, (every continent except Antarctica), are commonly associated with scheming, scavenging, and death, and are omnivores. However, we are quickly drawn into a host of new information about crows – such as the fact that they can recognize and distinguish a single face in a crowd, their advanced ability to watch, learn, and remember, and the fact that they use tools to acquire food – a feat that aside from humans, only primates and elephants have mastered.

The film starts with an introduction to a scientific experiment involving human facial recognition amongst crows, and leads up to a climax which will take place several months later when the experiment is complete. The decision to make this experiment the central focus of the movie is questionable, as the basis for the experiment doesn’t seem to lead to any new information that isn’t already given in the documentary. Instead, the most exciting moment of the film is when we are invited to watch the first trial of an experiment measuring the complexity of the crow brain. A short stick is set outside of a small, caged box housing a longer stick, and a piece of meat is wedged deep inside a crevice in which only a stick can be used to fetch it. A crow is then released into this scene, with a panel of excited scientists wondering what will happen. The crow is immediately drawn to the food and, realizing its beak cannot reach it, grabs for the short stick, which also cannot reach it. After scrutinizing the caged box, it cleverly uses the short stick to pull the long stick from the cage, which it then uses to reach the meat. It is experiments such as this which has led scientists today to refer to the crow as the “feathered ape.”

The camerawork in the movie is impressive. Creative camera angles paired with close-up, sharp, images, leave one to wonder how they ever pulled it off. We are brought into the treetops to watch the nests of baby crows, into the city to watch crows stealing wire hangers for their nests, and into the streets to observe a crow dropping a walnut with the intent to break its shell during a red traffic light so as not to get run over. The images matching the narrator’s descriptions are nothing short of amazing. The narration is at times funny, as we watch a crow eating all different colors of gummy bears and are told about the variety in their diet, haunting as we watch a “crow funeral” as a a tree is completely covered in crows silently watching over the body of a dead crow, then minutes later, all fly off in unison, and sad as we find that a particularly spunky crow is killed by oncoming traffic. This film is sure to educate, as it will keep even the most unenthusiastic viewer entertained for its 52-minute length.