Why the crow has the coolest bird kanji of them all

In Japanese, the crow (烏) and bird (鳥) kanji are almost identical, except for a subtle (and on the surface arbitrary) difference: the crow character 烏 lacks a small horizontal stroke compared to 鳥.

What's so cool about it?

You may be thinking "Well of course they are similar, isn't the crow just a bird after all? Doesn't make sense for those kanji to be so similar?" and that's a valid point.

Or at least it would be one if every species of bird was represented by a kanji that's a slight variation of the bird kanji, which is not the case. Look at the following common birds names:

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As you can see, every kanji is either:

the bird kanji combined with other radicals on the left, or

a jukugo word (a word made of consecutive kanji), or

a different kanji altogheter.

The bird kanji is already pretty complicated without adding more stuff to it after all, isn't it?

The crow kanji on the other hand, does the opposite: it takes the bird kanji and removes a stroke, and not a random one: in the ancient pictographic writing, the horizontal stroke that's missing actually represents the eye.

Don't crows have eyes too?

Ah, I see you are a very smart one, but! the fact about crows is that unlike the majority of diurnal birds, which have a light colored plumage that contrasts clearly againts the dark color of the eyes, crows wear total black. This make the eyes very difficult to spot at a glance, making them look like they have no eyes at all (creepy).

That's why the kanji looks like that, because it's almost like a normal bird. Just eyeless. This also makes incredibly easy to remember and recognize the crow kanji and to distinguish it from the bird kanji.

Like crows weren't cool enough already, they also have the coolest bird kanji ever.

Trivia

According to this guide, there's a question about this kanji in the Persona 5 Royal exam. So if you thought nothing useful for your everyday life could be learned from this post, I'm happy to prove you wrong 👹