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CrowLingo

PILLAR I — THE SPECIES

Why this species, before any model.

The American crow has one of the largest vocal repertoires in the corvid family — and a fifty-year research record to match. Before the algorithms, understand the animal.

Open the repertoire atlas →Explore a cluster
795 RECORDINGS · 9 CLUSTERS

SUB-TOPICS

Five ways into the species.

INTERACTIVE

Repertoire Atlas

The 2D vocal map. Nine emergent clusters, real spectrograms, behavioral interpretation.

DEEP DIVE

Vocalization Types

Caws, rattles, knocks, coos, begging. The ethological taxonomy, from hand-labels to embeddings.

ANATOMY

Vocal Anatomy

The syrinx, not the larynx. How a bird produces graded, harmonic sound without vocal cords.

COGNITION

Cognition & Society

Face recognition, tool use, funeral gatherings. The mind behind the voice.

INTERACTIVE

Cluster Explorer

One cluster at a time. Audio, spectrogram, behavioral context, primary citations.

FIG 1.1 — THE NINE CLUSTERS

Every call type, placed on the map.

Full interactive atlas →

Territorial caw

Long, rolling, declarative. 94 recordings.

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Mobbing alarm

Short, sharp, recruiting. 88 recordings.

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Assembly

Gathering signal, rhythmic. 112 recordings.

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Rattle complex

Mechanical, affiliative. 67 recordings.

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Open the repertoire atlas.

Nine clusters, 795 real recordings, interactive spectrograms. The core experience of CrowLingo.

Enter the atlas →

Frequently asked

What people ask about this.

Why focus on American crows specifically?
American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) have one of the most-studied corvid behavioral literatures, a large public CC-licensed audio corpus, and a vocal repertoire dense enough to map meaningfully. The Marzluff Seattle research program supplies the cognitive context; Mates et al. supply the acoustic baseline.
What makes the American crow worth studying as a communicative animal?
Crows recognize and remember individual human faces for years, pass face-recognition information socially across family groups, use tools, live in cooperative family groups with helpers, and demonstrate causal reasoning. The substrate for cultural communication exists; the vocal channel is one part of it.