corvid quarrell

Whilst pottering around the house early (~8am) on a sunday morning I heard lot's of cracking and cahing out in the back garden. Instantly, I knew this would provide me with a precious chance to purposefully observe a rarer (at least to a novice) quality of corvid behaviour. Even in my ignorance of birds I could tell that there two species were involved; they were either quarrelling or reacting to some commonly perceived emergency. You see, I've always liked corvids ("the crows"), but recently a new awareness of jackdaws and carrions (which N'asti and I have seen "hooded" on the West Coast of Scotland), together with a sounding resemblence to my surname, have brought these aesthetically and intellectually smart birds closer to my heard. N'asti has poured further fuel on the flame of my corvidophilia by giving me a very nice paperback on rooks and jackdaws by naturalist Mark Cocker called "Crow Country". The excitement was thus quite high as I scrambled for my mobile phone to be able to record this two species corvid interaction. Even in my excited daze, it didn't take me many seconds to cringe at how my phone camera has no video facility and inferior resolution and working distance (zoom). It was also painful to have to remember where the bloody sound recorder in the phone was, but I managed to successfully sample the soundtrack to this commotion. The result is here.

Then I remembered schwester gave me her old Fuji digital which is actually a really good digital given how old it is. It takes nice pictures, but mostly unlike my phone, it can record short movies. Further scrambling was involved to get the camera out of the Nature bag to film the commotion. Unfortunately by the time I was ready to shoot the bird quarrel had dissipated. I say quarrel but I haven't the faintest as to why the birds were shouting at each other. I can tell you who the actors were in this corvid comedy of characters, though. There were a couple of large carrions and at least one magpie, all on the same tree. The crows perched on the topmost branches shouting down at the magpies who were chittered back or in the same direction.