[derefr]

Odd that the most obvious hypothesis wasn't given: the crow was probably using its alarm call to warn other crows. Crows are social animals, who care about the fates of their "friends and acquaintances" — so they would do that.

But also, on a tangent, there is a bird that does this kind of non-conspecific alarm calling the time as part of its food-gathering strategy: the African fork-tailed drongo.

The drongo gives true alarm calls to food-rival species nearby, to tell them when it has spotted a mutual predator. This leads to these food-rival species coming to rely on these signals. But then, every once in a while, it gives a false alarm, to get the food-rivals to run away for a bit, so it can nab the bugs/berries/etc that the rival would have been eating.

[thaumasiotes]

There's also an African bird whose foraging strategy includes alerting large mammals to the presence of food that they can harvest and the bird can scavenge.

In fact, there is a family of such birds, the honeywarblers, who locate beehives, then find humans and lead them to the beehives.

Wikipedia says that the behavior is dying out because there aren't enough human foragers.

[hiddencost]

It's called an allegory

[card_zero]

No, a drongo.