Welcome back to Crow Week here on the Epic Gardening podcast, everyone.

We have Dr. Kaley Swift, a PhD in Abyan Behavioral Ecology from the University of Washington,

also known as Corvid Research all over the internet, and where I initially found you

was TikTok Kaley, fascinating, and you had this post about how to ethically befriend

crows, and the thing that stuck out to me in that sentence was ethically, I didn't understand

what level of ethics was appropriate for that behavior or situation in the first place,

and so perhaps we could even start there before we get into how you could befriend crows

in the first place.

Yeah, happy to.

So, look, anytime we are engaging, and by engaging, what I really mean is feeding wildlife.

We need to be doing a lot of work in the background thinking about what are the various outcomes

of this, what are the problems associated with it, because more often than not, it is

a problem to feed wildlife.

We, as a culture, have decided that birds are different, and there's very good reasons

for that.

Birds are small, for one, they don't generally attack people.

They don't generally cause infestations or transmit diseases directly to people.

There's all kinds of things we could unpack there, but it's really important to understand

that in general feeding wildlife is not a good thing for wildlife, mainly for the wildlife,

sometimes not for people, but mainly for the wildlife.

So that's kind of the first step.

But like I said, birds for whole variety of reasons are a little bit different.

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