It is very common and readily distinguished from the house crow (Corvus splendens), which has a grey neck.

In appearance, it can be difficult to distinguish from either of these species although the plumage tends to be more uniformly glossed in purple and has a longer bill with a fine tip and a less arched culmen.

This glossy all-black crow has a heavy black bill but without an arching culmen (upper edge of the mandible) and has a fine tip.

Eugene Oates lumped this with Corvus macrorhynchos in The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma (1889), based on what had been concluded by Allan Octavian Hume based on the inability to see consistent differences in the specimens.

[3][4][5] W. E. Brooks had pointed out that the voice of the Himalayan species differed significantly apart from having a longer tail.

[13] Salim Ali and Dillon Ripley in the Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan used macrorhynchos, under which they placed four forms: culminatus, intermedius, levaillantii and tibetosinensis.

[15] Comparisons of the vocalizations of birds from different areas also indicated clear differences[16] and analysis of sequence divergence in the mitochondrial DNA suggests that the Himalayan population (termed as japonensis by some or as intermedius+tibetosinensis by those who restrict the range of japonensis to Japan) differentiated from the plains-dwelling culminatus nearly 2 million years ago.

It may soften its food by dropping it in water,[20] and have also been observed to eat sand after feeding on meat from a carcass.