Wildlife, especially crows

And today I was observing and photographing some ravens. Beautiful creatures!

I love both crows and woodpigeons. Crows are so clever and make me laugh and pigeons are cosy and quite tame. We give them fresh water regularly in the garden and they come quite close to us. 

I'm not exactly knowledgeable about birds and bird species etc but I absolutely love watching them too and feel like I could also watch them for hours on end. Honestly my favourite bird right now is the Common wood pigeon, they're so adorable.

I love all the corvids, they have such fascinating lives, I saw my first chough a couple of weeks ago, it was being hassled by gulls and yelling it's head off.

When I was at uni, we had crows and jackdaws all around us, the crows nested in trees near my hall of residence and once they recognised people if they liked you they would drop twigs on you as you walked under their nests and "laugh". I used to have feeders on my windows and put food on the window cills, one time I baked a ginger cake and it got burnt because of a faulty oven seal, I gave the burnt bit to the birds and the jackdaws loved it. I was walking past the low roofed library and some jackdaws were sitting on the roof and cawed at me to attract my attention, when they knew they had it, they all bowed to me in unison!

A few years ago, when I had my greyhounds and an inherited papillion, the local rooks would follow us on the off chance that one of the dogs would catch a rabbit. One day as we got out of the car and into the field, a rook fle down and looked me and cawed, and then looked at my little papillion and caawed again. I sort of knew it was asking me, why catch a rabbit to eat, but not this similar sized dog? A good question I thought.

Each Spring there is a battle in a large tree opposite our house, a prime nesting site. It is between a pair of crows and up to 6 magpies, the crows always win.