The raven and the crow in art and literature, and how to tell the two birds apart

Almost every black bird silhouette sold as a raven is a crow, and almost nobody minds, because the two words have done different jobs in English for centuries regardless of which species is in front of us. The birds are genuinely distinguishable, though, and once you know how, the difference is obvious at a hundred metres. Here is the bird, then the literature, then what to look at when you are choosing an object.

Same genus, different birds

Ravens and crows are both in the genus Corvus, within the crow family, Corvidae. The common raven is Corvus corax and it has one of the largest ranges of any bird, across the whole northern hemisphere. The crow you see depends on where you are: the carrion crow, Corvus corone, in western Europe, the hooded crow further north and east, and the American crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos, across most of North America.

Two other all-black-looking corvids confuse the issue. The rook has a pale, bare, whitish face patch at the base of a thinner bill and a peaked crown, and it nests in colonies. The jackdaw is much smaller, grey on the nape, and has a pale eye. A lot of birds people call crows are rooks, and a lot of birds people call small crows are jackdaws.

Telling a raven from a crow at distance

Size is the big one, and it is a bigger difference than most people expect. A common raven is around 60cm long with a wingspan well over a metre, and it weighs something like three or four times what a crow does. A carrion crow or an American crow is around 45cm to 50cm with a wingspan closer to a metre. If it looks buzzard-sized in flight, it is a raven.

Tail shape is the most useful single character, because it works on a distant bird in the air. A raven's tail is wedge-shaped or diamond-shaped, with the central feathers longest. A crow's tail is squarer, closer to a fan. The mnemonic is worth keeping: crow has a fan, raven has a diamond.

Then the head and the voice. A raven's bill is enormously heavy, deeper than a crow's and slightly hooked, and the throat carries shaggy, spiky feathers that a crow does not have. A raven's call is a deep, hollow, resonant croak, often described as cronk or prruk, and it carries a long way. A crow gives a flat, nasal, repeated caw. Ravens also soar, roll and tumble in flight, where crows mostly flap steadily, and ravens are usually seen in ones and twos where crows gather in larger numbers.

What these birds actually do

The corvids are among the most capable birds that exist, and the evidence is experimental rather than anecdotal. Several species cache food in hundreds of locations and recover it later. New Caledonian crows make and use tools, shaping hooked twigs to extract grubs, and they do it in the wild rather than only in laboratories.

American crows have been shown in controlled experiments to learn and remember individual human faces, using masks, and to pass on an aversion to a particular face to birds that never experienced the original event. Ravens cache food and will re-cache it when they have reason to believe another bird was watching.

They also play, which is less often studied and easier to see. Ravens slide down snowbanks, hang upside down from branches and carry objects for no obvious purpose. None of this requires any mystical framing. They are long-lived, social, generalist omnivores with large brains, and that combination produces exactly this sort of behaviour in mammals too.

The raven in literature and belief

Norse mythology gives Odin two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, who fly over the world and report back. That is a belief recorded in medieval Icelandic sources rather than a fact about ravens, but it is the oldest and most influential reason the bird reads as a knowing one. In Welsh and Arthurian material the name Bran, meaning crow or raven, attaches to a legendary figure, and raven banners appear in accounts of Norse warfare.

Poe published The Raven in 1845 and fixed the bird in English for good: a single large black bird, indoors, at night, repeating one word. Almost all modern raven imagery descends from that poem rather than from any older source, and the poem is also responsible for the bird standing specifically for grief rather than for knowledge.

The Tower of London ravens are worth treating carefully. The birds are real and are kept there now. The story that the kingdom will fall if they leave is not well attested in anything earlier than the nineteenth century, and researchers who have gone looking for an older source have not found one. The custom is probably Victorian or later, which does not make it less interesting, only less ancient.

The crow in pictures

Crows do better in visual art than in literature. Japanese screen painting has a long tradition of crows on gold, in flocks, treated as pure black shape against pure flat ground, and that is still one of the best solutions anyone has found to the problem of drawing a black bird.

Van Gogh's wheatfield with crows, painted in 1890, uses them as marks rather than as birds: a scatter of black strokes over the field. Collective nouns did their bit too. A murder of crows and an unkindness of ravens come from the fifteenth-century lists of hunting and company terms, which were partly a word game for the educated rather than usage anybody adopted at the time.

The practical lesson from the Japanese screens is about flocks. Black birds work best as silhouettes at varied sizes and varied angles, which is why a single large bird and a scatter of small ones both read well, and an evenly spaced row of identical birds reads as wallpaper.

What to look at when you are choosing an object

Most black bird decor is crow-shaped whatever it is called. Check the three things that separate the species and you will know what you have: how deep the bill is relative to the head, whether the tail comes to a point, and whether the throat is smooth or shaggy. A piece like Crow in the Thorns is doing what cut metal does best, which is a clean outline against the wall rather than plumage detail.

For a framed or filled silhouette the bill is the detail that carries it. Too thin and the bird becomes a blackbird; too heavy and it stops looking like anything. If a piece is sold as a raven, as The Raven in the Frame is, the bill and the tail are where you can see whether the maker knew the difference or just liked the word.

Cast birds have a different problem, which is that small castings lose the legs. An owl form such as the brass owl survives shrinking because it is a compact, upright, round-headed shape with its feet tucked under it. A corvid is long, horizontal and leggy, so it is a harder thing to cast small and keep recognisable.

Questions people actually ask

What is the difference between a raven and a crow?

A raven is much larger, with a heavier bill, shaggy throat feathers and a wedge-shaped tail, and it gives a deep croak. A crow is smaller, with a squarer fan-shaped tail and a flat repeated caw.

Are ravens and crows the same species?

No. They are separate species in the same genus, Corvus. The common raven is Corvus corax; the crows include the carrion crow in Europe and the American crow in North America.

Can crows really recognise human faces?

Yes. Controlled experiments with masks have shown American crows learning to recognise and avoid a specific face, and passing that avoidance on to birds that never experienced the original encounter.