Some birds are universally loved, such as the Robin, the Kingfisher and the Mute Swan. There is not an RSPB Shop in the land without some piece of merchandise adorned with these birds. Of course, Christmas wouldn’t Christmas with a card with a Robin on it. That cheery little chappy sat on a snowy perch. With it now known that Robins are belligerent bullies of other species at your feeding table, and woe betide any other interloping male who wanders into his territory, it is a mystery to me why corvids get such a bad rap, and yet these are splendidly intelligent but mysterious birds.
They have long been the subject of folklore and superstition, some of it justified, some of it not. It is known that Magpies take small fledglings from the nest, and that they are the subject of much debate on their impact on songbird numbers, but they have been viewed with much distrust long before scientists started number crunching. I currently have a Magpie nest in the woods beyond my hedgerow, there is one male chasing away all the other birds routinely, but he is not doing this out of malice, he is simply protecting his nest and the female whom is sitting on eggs. So I let him get on with it. Over the past few days his “attacks” have abated, and my garden is returning to normal levels of squabbling Robins, displaying Dunnocks and beautiful Bullfinches.
Jackdaws are another intelligent corvid; their piercingly blue eyes just sparkle with it. I have watched a pair of Jackdaws work out how to unpick a knot on a coconut shell full of bird cake, so that it would drop to the floor. Aesop called the Jackdaw the vainest bird in the woods, and in the fable, he covered himself with the plumage of other birds to hide its ugliness. I have no idea why? I have already mentioned their sapphire blue eyes, but their crown has the same silvery sheen of a Silverback gorilla. Jackdaw flocks can be just as spectacular as any Starling murmuration. Our local village played host to some stunning displays during mid-winter at sunset.
Another crow that can form sizeable roosts are Rooks, their noisy colonies unmistakable in the treetops. They also feature in an Aesop fable: The Crow and the Pitcher. A passing crow is thirsty and there is a pitcher nearby, but the water level is too low to reach. The crow works out how to displace the level of the water by dropping small pebbles until it has reached a level he can reach. It turned out that this was more than just a fable, as the astonishing bit of footage at the bottom of this blog proves!
The most impressive of all the crow family is the Raven. There is a pair in the area where I live, and occasionally they fly over my house. They usually attract the attention of the local Jackdaws who try to mob them, when they do you really get a good idea of the difference in size between these two birds. The Raven is about the size of a buzzard, and makes the Jackdaws look like Starlings as they try to chase their large cousins away! The Raven call is quite unmistakable too; a much deeper, throaty and deeply resonant “kronk-kronk” unlike any other corvid. The most famous Ravens are the ones at the Tower of London. The superstition says “If the Tower of London ravens are lost or fly away, the Crown will fall and Britain with it”. This is quite a responsibility for any species of bird to carry!
The well-known collective noun for all of these birds is a murder of crows; another is a parliament of crows. The first is thought to arise from their feeding habits as carrion eaters. They were often seen feeding from corpses on battlefields, and are mentioned in historical records as far back as the fifteenth century of “murthers of crows” turning battlegrounds black for easy pickings after the combat had ended. The parliament of crows is thought to derive from a rarely seen bit of behaviour of “crow courts”. There have been accounts of a large number of rooks, or ravens forming roughly circle around “the accused”; a “judgement” being passed upon this one individual and the punishment being death. Although this may sound like a bit of a myth, there are enough reports of it happening that lends itself to the belief that it actually does occur, whether it is just routine territorial conflict or not is of course open to conjecture.
When it comes to corvids, sometimes truth can be stranger than fiction.
“Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore. "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore - Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
Edgar Allen Poe – The Raven (1845)