A Girl Fed Crows in Her Backyard for Years. They Started Bringing Her Gifts.

It started by accident. In 2011, four-year-old Gabi Mann was walking to the school bus in her Seattle neighborhood of Portage Bay when she dropped bits of her lunch. Crows noticed. Crows always notice.

By the time she was six, Gabi had turned the accidental feeding into a daily ritual. Every morning, she and her mother Lisa would put out peanuts and dog food on their backyard bird feeder. The crows came on schedule.

Then the crows started paying them back.

The Gifts

Small objects began appearing on the empty bird feeder after the food was taken. A black button. A blue LEGO piece. A single blue earring. A piece of beer-colored glass worn smooth by time. A heavily rusted screw that Gabi labeled "Third Favorite." A pearl-colored heart. A broken light bulb. A yellow bead.

Gabi kept every single gift in individually labeled plastic bags. She catalogued them with the care of an eight-year-old museum curator.

The Lens Cap

The most remarkable gift wasn't left for Gabi. It was left for her mother.

Lisa Mann had been photographing a bald eagle in a nearby alley when her camera lens cap slipped and fell. She assumed it was gone. Some time later, it appeared on the edge of the family's birdbath.

Lisa pulled up their backyard bird-cam footage and found the answer: a crow had picked up the lens cap, carried it to the birdbath, and spent time rinsing it in the water before leaving it on the rim.

"I'm sure that it was intentional," Lisa said. "They watch us all the time. I'm sure they knew I dropped it."

The Science

John Marzluff, professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington, has extensively studied crow cognition. His research has demonstrated that crows can recognize and remember individual human faces for years. Gift-giving to humans who feed them, while not fully understood, has been documented in multiple cases.

As for Gabi, the gifts kept coming. She never missed a morning feeding. The crows never missed a morning delivery.