Don't Stone the Crows

Crows have been on my mind a lot lately (maybe I do have too much time on my hands after all). This is partly because I'm reading Mark Cocker's rather wonderful book about them, Crow Country, and, in tandem, W.H. Hudson's still more wonderful Birds In London, which is largely about crows in their various forms. I'm trying to love these big black birds, with their slouching posture, ugly gait, preposterous beaks and malicious-seeming eyes - and it's not easy. Rooks are one thing (Cocker points out something I'd never consciously noticed before - that the instant shorthand for a British rural location, on TV, flim or radio, is a background of rookery sounds). But the carrion crows that are invading my corner of Surrey suburbia in ever increasing numbers are another matter. This morning, as I left the house, the racket was amazing - so loud and hideous I thought the local parakeets and jays must be contributing, but no, it was some kind of ferocious territorial battle among the rooftops and chimneys, between crows and magpies. Crows have been known to eat young magpies, and for that they should be applauded. If it was reciprocal, they might even get each other's numbers down, but there's no sign of it - and the crows, now, are definitely in the ascendant. The unfortunate effect of this burgeoning corvid population is a decline in songbird numbers - smaller birds, their young and their eggs are all grist to the corvid mill - but of course that sinister organisation the RSPB won't blame any bird for anything. Still, crows can be loved - as Cocker and Hudson and even this demonstrate. I'm beginning to come round to them already...