I Am We: How Crows Come Together to Survive is a 2025 picture book written by Leslie Bernard Booth and illustrated by Alexandra Finkeldey.
It is nonfiction, but it is paced and illustrated like a good story. It starts with a first-bird point of view, from a crow’s perspective, a dark bird moving through darkness. It slides smoothly from free flight to fear, and from a solitary perspective to a collective perspective, as the individual birds gather together, covering all branches on a tree and looking in all directions. They watch, and they cry out when they spy threats, and they survive these threats by acting together.
That shift to a collective protagonist is one of the things that makes this book stands out, because seeing anything from a group perspective is rare. The other thing is Finkeldey’s images. They are often dark, and border on the uncanny as they focus now on a single bird’s head that spills eye and beak across two pages, now on dozens of black wings silhouetted against the orange of the setting sun or blending black on black with the night.
