Thursday, July 21, 2016

A Murder of Crows

My home sits halfway up on the side of a mountain. Behind us we have woods and shale cliffs. The rear of our property drops off into a sort of gully through which a brook rambles.

This part of the state has been in a state of severe drought the past few months. The bed of the brook is bone dry. This has happened before and I've been able to walk up the brook in the past. If it ever cools off I have a mission- I once walked along the brook when it was fairly dry and just took a series of pictures. It wasn't until I got home that I realized that in one of those pictures of the dry brook bed there is a perfect heart-shaped rock! This was about six or seven years ago because I remember hanging a picture of the "heart of stone" at my desk at work ad people commenting on it. My husband now wants that stone/rock. It's probably bigger than my fist but it's hard to judge size in a photograph.
He and I plan on hiking up the brook behind one or two houses of neighbors and tracking that stone down.

We also have a murder of crows living in the woods behind us. Every evening they float down from the oak trees like paragliders to strut around on the toasted lawn looking for anything that might be available to them to eat. There are four or five primary cows that come foraging but you can hear others in the woods calling to them.

Tonight I broke up three slices of bread and hurled it out the bathroom window. They took off at the throwing motion, but soon returned and found the bread. A small gray squirrel also noticed the food being thrown from the window and zipped in to grab his quarter of a slice of bread! Well, the crows didn't like that he was 'mooching' their bread and one tried to chase him off while another stacked pieces of bread and grabbed them up in his beak (the pig!). Well, the squirrel raced halfway up the deck stairs then dove onto the top of the holly bush outside the kitchen window where it settled down to have his supper.

The crows took everything else and went back to their rookery along the brook.

Later on we'll hear the raspy bark of the red fox who hunts along the brook. He was out there again this morning while I was eating breakfast. The animals are getting a little desperate with low food supplies and no water. It's been a bad summer for them, but there are some acorns on the oaks, although not as many as in the past. I guess this is nature's version of survival of the fittest.

Right now it's the crafty crows who are winning.

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