Counting crows: Corvid adaptations to anthropogenic environments demonstrate how behavioural ecology improves interpretation of multispecies co-culture

Bird ecology studies clearly show that expansion of urban environments today creates a shift towards avian communities dominated by generalist species. The avifauna inhabiting urban spaces results from long-term reciprocal niche construction between humans and birds, stretching across millennia of shared histories. These communities do not simply reflect consequences of human environmental modification; rather they materialise the dynamic interplay between anthropogenic change and avian behavioural and ecological adaptation, with both groups actively shaping the ecological opportunities available to the other. In this paper, we examine how avifaunal remains can be used to infer past socio-environmental settings. First, we focus on corvids in Southwest Asia across the Neolithic transition, looking for early evidence of emerging “mutual ecologies”, then we compare these patterns with archaeological examples from historic times in Europe, to demonstrate the broader applicability and the potential of an archaeoecological approach to interpreting corvid remains. By integrating behavioural and ecological knowledge of corvids with a multispecies archaeological perspective, we demonstrate how humans and corvids have long co-created shared environments. This approach recognises corvids as historical actors whose interactions with people contributed to the co-construction of ecological niches, archaeological landscapes, and shared histories of hybrid communities.