Corvids

Birds fascinate me, especially the corvid family. They always seem to have a keen intelligence and although they may see clumsy and ungainly when on the ground, there is a certain deliberateness in the way they ponder before they move. They are so intelligent, I don’t think we yet appreciate how intelligent they really are, certainly they use tools and recognize themselves in mirrors.

As children in Cambridge, we would see rookeries when we went out into the countryside, and the cries of the birds wheeling in the sky is always so evocative. We would also see the occasionally crow too, but I am more aware of them since we have moved to Somerset. We often see them in the garden, or standing on the roof of the garage or the neighbour’s roof, surveying the surrounding area.

We occasionally see jays in the woods near here, they are so pretty, really gorgeous, but unlike many pretty things, they are very shy. Ravens are rare, and although I have heard them on the quarry cliffs in Uphill, I’ve never seen one… not round here anyway! A great joy for me was to see one in a field in Iceland when I was there in February!

When we moved to Somerset we came across a bird, now considered a pest, which we had never seen on the east of the country… the magpie. I have seen groups of up to twenty in trees and bushes round here. They look so striking, and yet they are such bullies and so destructive of other birds.

I once saw an incident in the garden where we had put some bird food out and there was a mixed group of feeders, sparrows, a couple of blackbirds, starlings, a few little tits and finches, a couple of jackdaws .. suddenly a magpie swooped down and started attacking the other birds, screaming and shrieking fearsomely. The attack didn’t last long; a great big crow jumped off the garage roof, flew onto the lawn and set about the magpie and scared him away. The crow flew clumsily back onto the garage roof and the little birds returned to peacefully feed together.