Method is more important than strength, when you wish to control your enemies. By dropping golden beads near a snake, a crow once managed to have a passer-by kill the snake for the beads.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The crow has a cunning rep in the avian kingdom. It is the messenger for the Zoroastrian good god Ahura-Mazda, as well as for Hermes (Mercury) and Apollo. Norse god Odin, had two ravens, Huginn and Munnin (Mind and Memory), one on each shoulder. There is a Greek myth that recounts how the crow became black, the love story of Coronis and Ischys. Coronis was pregnant with Apollo’s baby, but before she had the kid, she went and shacked up with Ischys. Apollo found out about this from a crow and in his anger turned the crow black for bringing bad news and then proceeded to kill Ischys and the pregnant Coronis (for what it’s worth, he did feel bad as his lover was lying on the funeral pyre, so he saved the kid by performing the first c-section, the child was Aesclepius, future father of medicine). This identification as a harbinger is possibly why a gathering of crows is a "murder", of ravens an "unkindness."

Crows and other corvidae top the bird IQ scale, followed by falcons, hawks, herons and woodpeckers. They have unusually large brains for their size, about the size of a chimpanzee’s, while rivaling the great apes in intelligence. They use traffic stops to crush nuts, setting and retrieving them during red lights. Like other scavengers they know to follow armies for carrion. They can talk, make tools out of wire, and form complex hierarchical societies. They can even lie.

Dr Bungyar, University of Austria, conducted an experiment to see what ravens learned from each other while foraging. He had two birds, one dominant and one subordinate, named after Odin’s. Their task was to work out which color-coded film containers held cheese, open them and eat. The subordinate was far better at this than the dominant. But as soon as he’d start eating, the dominant one would bully him away to gain access to the food. So then the subordinate headed over to a set of empty containers, opened them enthusiastically, and pretended to eat. The dominant followed, whereupon the subordinate rushed to the loaded containers, having clearly misled the other. But that’s not all, the dominant one soon grew wise and stopped falling for the tactic, at which point the subordinate got angry and started throwing things about. Crows not only lie, but they can tell when others lie, and even get upset when they’re found out.

Quoth the raven, Economist
Crows as clever as great apes, study says, National Geographics
Crows and jays topbird IQ scale, BBC