Odd Rain?

[Richard]

I was out on the first of my two dogs walks this morning with my daughter’s sun loving husky. I continued out of the top of the very open field, along a  shaded lane where the overhanging trees offered very welcome shade. As we slowly rambled along a loud thud caught our attention and to both of our surprises there was a semi-comatose crow, flat on its back. Neither of us knew what to do so we watched for a moment or two as the bird lay there, then slowly awoke, put on its, ‘What a stupid thing to do look’, before shaking and righting itself off then selecting the only practical flight path option and flying away quite normally.

[Ed P]

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.

[Bob Williams]

Same thing happens here occasionally, usually when I am in the bathroom early morning. Sun travels almost East to West, slight southern bias. It hits them between the eyes and they think the window is an open space, then THUMP and I call upon SWMBO to check out a casualty. 9/10 times they are up and flying before she gets there.

Crows are one of the most intelligent birds. I have set them all kinds of puzzles to get food, they always manage to solve them. Sometimes two will work together. In Escape & Evasion during Army service, I was taught by an old sweat to use crows as a warning device: feed them on the ground and they take it to the trees or other high point, where they roost and hang around for more. If other humans not in your party approach, they alert their fellow crows and you, by loud caws. I have actually had them on my shoulders, feeding from my hand.

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Richard]

To be fair they had been crowing in the trees above and wheeling in the sky above while all the excitement was being played out on the ground. Perhaps this was one clumsy crow that did fly into a branch or something.

[Ed P]

If you see lots of ‘crows’, those crows are rooks!

[Richard]

I am confident it was part of the murder of crows. The beak and feather pattern are more aligned with the crow than the rook. The ferocious magpies are a totally different bunch, the crows are noisy but the mobbing magpies are a really nasty parliament of these often spiteful birds.

Harvesting is in full swing at the moment with a lots of big slow vehicles lumbering about and breaking down with flat tyres. A side effect is the fields and lanes are coated with discarded produce attracting anything that will fancy a nice easy meal.

[wasbit]

I’ve always used mischief for a group of magpies but on The Chase tonight they called them a tittering.

Parliament is for owls. I’ve never heard of it being used for magpies.  🙂

Further to my post in another thread, I’ve not seen any bees visiting our bird bath for several years but there have been a few wasps in the last couple of weeks.

 

--
Regards
wasbit

Rig 1: Optiplex 3050 SFF
Rig 2: Asus ROG G20CB (rebuilt wreck)
Rig 3: HP Elitebook 8440P

Dear Starfleet, hate you, hate the Federation, taking Voyager. - Janeway

[Bob Williams]

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.

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Ed P]

Bob, your young crow was very lucky the adults did not administer their version of CPR!

CorvidResearch

[Richard]

wasbit wrote:

I’ve always used mischief for a group of magpies but on The Chase tonight they called them a tittering. Parliament is for owls. I’ve never heard of it being used for magpies. ? Further to my post in another thread, I’ve not seen any bees visiting our bird bath for several years but there have been a few wasps in the last couple of weeks.

I rechecked, parliament  is one of several names for the nasty bad tempered ‘things’ also known as magpies.

[Richard]

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. It is an old agricultural area with links that passed several Kings Henry. The old farm house and barn collection is sometimes called dowager house said to relate to one of Henry the 8ths wives.

I know what you mean about the rookeries large ever expanding rafts floating high in the trees. They very evident in winter when the clocks of leaves are gone but the woods close to the bird drop are not somewhere I have seen any nests. though winder is not a great time to trudge the fields! Recently the fields have been black with birds rushing to grab all the seeds they can following the timely gathering in of harvests, though as usual when the magpies appear the air often appears to turn ‘blue’.

[D-Dan]

I blame beer. Crows are proper lushes.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Richard]

Oops, that should have been cloaks of leaves…

[wasbit]

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.

--
Regards
wasbit

Rig 1: Optiplex 3050 SFF
Rig 2: Asus ROG G20CB (rebuilt wreck)
Rig 3: HP Elitebook 8440P

Dear Starfleet, hate you, hate the Federation, taking Voyager. - Janeway

[Ed P]

We have numerous Green and Greater Spotted Wood-Peckers but no lesser spotted ones. In common with many birds they love a peanut butter/meal worm mix.

[edit] btw if you ever need to bait for rats, although they have generally learned to avoid the ‘green’ and useless poisoned seed, mix it with peanut butter and they gobble it up, even better in a sandwich! (tip from a New York Metro guy I once knew)

[Richard]

With the old trees about the area we do get the chance appearance of woodpeckers in the garden, but they prefer to stay beneath on of our trees to do their grubbing. Since a few of the old and rotting once standing tree rumps have now fallen, the food source has become rarer and potential nest sites have reduced, so visits have become less common. The main big visitors are tree rats (pigeons), rather more gentle doves and the more rare raptor. They sometimes drop in for a meal of tree rat, most of the others are a range of smaller birds, some very small.

[JayCeeDee]

Ed P wrote:

…..if you ever need to bait for rats, although they have generally learned to avoid the ‘green’ and useless poisoned seed, mix it with peanut butter and they gobble it up, even better in a sandwich! (tip from a New York Metro guy I once knew)

The same unusual, quirky nibbles goes for the alligators in Florida. They love marshmallow. We were told this by a Park Ranger and we thought it was a wind-up, but they really do. Dropping a couple of 1″ cubes 10 feet off the boat, it was hilarious to watch them stealthily approach them and then snap they were gone. You’d have thought they needed toothpicks after, but they always came back for more. That’s one hell of a sweet tooth!!

[Author]

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