My roommate told me that as they went into an urban forest, they saw (or heard) a crow picking pieces of flesh off a still living and screaming rabbit until the rabbit eventually died.
Are crows able to prey on rabbits or was that incident more likely caused by a third, but then absent animal?
I don’t know exactly, but I suspect they can and sometimes do. Just this week I saw a crow terrorizing a duck, duck was waddling around and this crow came swooping in and totally blindsided the duck with feet. Like a literal flying side kick. Duck went tumbling and crow chased after pecking and stamping.
Eventually the crow stopped and the duck was alive, but it definitely had some pains after the short encounter.
All in all it was about thirty seconds, I’d bet the crow could’ve killed it within a minute, seeing how that duck hobbled afterwards.
Crows are omnivores, so would have no qualms about eating meat, although it’s not the main constituent of their diet. They are very intelligent and opportunistic and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of crows hunting smaller birds and animals (most likely during circumstances where other food sources are scarce).
They absolutely do. We had a nesting pair in a neighbors tree a few years ago. The crows terrorized the park. They hunted baby rabbits, preyed on songbird nests, scooped ducklings out of the pond and so on. They would also grab roadkill and eat it on roofs so you’d be sitting on the patio and the occasional rabbit or squirrel part would come raining down. I used to have a live and let live attitude but not that after that summer. I won’t let them nest around us anymore.
Fauna’s crazy.
