Miscellaneous desk
< April 5	<< Mar \| April \| May >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

April 6

Crow handedness

Do crows exhibit handedness, i.e when they land do they usually fold their right wing over the left, left over right, or show no preference?69.144.60.218 (talk) 23:25, 6 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Since they don't have hands, handedness as applied to crows always seems to apply to how they use their feet, e.g. when manipulating sticks. A web search for handedness and crows find plenty of suggestions of handedness in this sense, but I can't find anything about how they fold their wings.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 07:39, 7 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The more general term is laterality (includes species that don't have hands). And yes, crows do exhibit laterality:

"Behavioural Ecology Research Group - Crows - Laterality". users.ox.ac.uk.
"Human–like, population–level specialization in the manufacture of pandanus tools by New Caledonian crows Corvus moneduloides". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences. 22 February 2000. pp. 403–413. doi:10.1098/rspb.2000.1015.

—2606:A000:1126:28D:F935:C7E2:FE1:E49 (talk) 06:26, 8 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]