Hooded Crow

Hooded crows, like their more common relatives, are highly intelligent opportunists. Crows will eat almost anything including dead and decaying flesh. The sight of crows scavenging from dead bodies is one of the reasons why, throughout history, people all over the world have associated these birds with death.

When creating ‘Separated but not divorced’, which you can see on display in The Garden Room, Thomas Sidney Cooper originally included a crow pecking at bones in the bottom left corner of the painting. However he decided to remove the bird from the final composition, perhaps he thought it was too ominous a symbol.