Odd Rain?

The crow obviously became disorientated and whacked a branch. Despite putting bird silhouettes on our  patio door this is unfortunately a fairly regular occurrence in our house — normally idiot wood pigeons. No great loss if They don’t recover.

Corvid family, all closely related:

http://tinyurl.com/y6w48qta

Carrion Crow and Rook have unmistakably different beaks and the rook is smaller. Around our village there are many large woods and smaller copses of large, older trees. These are full of crows, many large rookeries, which is the name given to conglomerations of rooks or crows. Crows and rooks are the most social of birds, there are breeding pairs which are together for life and breed every year. They have great concern for their young: some crows and rooks will never breed, but act as ‘childminders’ to look after young whilst parent birds look for food. I experienced this concern a few years ago on Broadhaven beach in West Wales. A very young crow had been drenched by a wave after landing in the surf. I managed to get a towel around it and started to carry it back towards shore, when its calls drew several adult crows who dive-bombed me until I put it down. About 7 or 8 adult birds surrounded the young one and we walked away to a safe distance, sat down and watched. After about an hour, the young bird dried out and made it into the air, surrounded by adults. Then a strange thing happened: two of the birds peeled off and flew around us in a circle, cawing softly and looking us in the eyes, before flying away. It was almost as if they knew that we had been helping the young bird and were thanking us.

We get them on our back garden, trying and failing to get into the bird table and feeders. There is a real pandemonium every spring when the rookery over the road has eggs and/or young and the magpies are about. I cannot stand those egg and hatchling thieves and neither can the crows. They take to the sky and dive bomb the magpies from height, chasing them away. The crows I regard as the most intelligent of birds after some of the Parrot family. They can use tools to get food and I think if they had evolved opposable thumbs, the Human race would have a competitor! I just wish that they, and the smaller birds I feed, would not leave such objectionable substances on my car, although when the gulls form up over the Close, to go to the beaches after feeding on the local fields, their deposits are far larger and messier.

I blame beer. Crows are proper lushes.

Richard wrote:

Bob, we also have a number of old trees about the area along with a few woodpeckers, they are jumpy at the best of times and hate to be caught out in the open making them hard to photograph.

Although there are several spotted woodpeckers around, I had never seen a green one until a few years ago when we were loaned a caravan for a week at Blue Anchor Bay in Somerset. A pair were brazenly feeding on an ants nest on the well kept grass verge. They took no notice of us whilst we stopped to watch them for about 10 minutes.