DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
From The Onion this morning: Solitary Crow On Fence Post Portending Doom, Analysts Warn.
I'm sure you will be shocked- SHOCKED- to hear that I got all sorts of wriggly amusement from reading that.
Of course, the funniest part was the crow sitting unworried on the post while a special crow task force approached it. The crows around here- and most places I know of, for that matter- are so wary of humans that they tend to fly away if you so much as look at them sidewise.
This makes it very difficult to feed them, needless to say. Wait, come back! There's peanuts! I didn't even get to show you the peanuts yet!
As it happens, though, I *did* manage to feed peanuts to four different crows on Sunday. This is a rare and nifty treat. Due to the above-mentioned wariness, I hardly ever get to feed crows, despite the fact that I keep peanuts and a crow call in my car at all times. (I also tend to ignore the straightest route home in favor or detouring past parks and through streets where I've seen crows before, but sadly this rarely avails me anything.)
I lucked out though, Sunday, when I stopped at the bank to drop off my paycheck. A smallish group of crows was hanging out around the train tracks behind the bank. I managed to roll down the window and chuck out a peanut without spooking them off, and two of them eventually worked up the nerve to sidle over and see what I'd thrown. Once they realized it was food, they were quite amenable to having more of it tossed to them.
After the bank I went to get some breakfast at Jack-in-the-Box (like the terrible, terrible person that I am) so that I could go straight to bed when I got home. (Getting up at 4:30am for work will drive me to decisions like that, sometimes.) I parked in a nearby lot to eat in the hopes that I could lure over some more birds, and lo! After some starlings and blackbirds had thoroughly investigated my initial peanut offering, two more crows came by and consented to be fed. Hurrah!
In both instances, though, the feeding sessions were cut short when other humans came by and the crows took flight. And these were just single humans going about their non-crow-related business! Task force, indeed. Pfft! If crows are harbingers of doom, they are the most shoo-able harbingers EVER.
I'm sure you will be shocked- SHOCKED- to hear that I got all sorts of wriggly amusement from reading that.
Of course, the funniest part was the crow sitting unworried on the post while a special crow task force approached it. The crows around here- and most places I know of, for that matter- are so wary of humans that they tend to fly away if you so much as look at them sidewise.
This makes it very difficult to feed them, needless to say. Wait, come back! There's peanuts! I didn't even get to show you the peanuts yet!
As it happens, though, I *did* manage to feed peanuts to four different crows on Sunday. This is a rare and nifty treat. Due to the above-mentioned wariness, I hardly ever get to feed crows, despite the fact that I keep peanuts and a crow call in my car at all times. (I also tend to ignore the straightest route home in favor or detouring past parks and through streets where I've seen crows before, but sadly this rarely avails me anything.)
I lucked out though, Sunday, when I stopped at the bank to drop off my paycheck. A smallish group of crows was hanging out around the train tracks behind the bank. I managed to roll down the window and chuck out a peanut without spooking them off, and two of them eventually worked up the nerve to sidle over and see what I'd thrown. Once they realized it was food, they were quite amenable to having more of it tossed to them.
After the bank I went to get some breakfast at Jack-in-the-Box (like the terrible, terrible person that I am) so that I could go straight to bed when I got home. (Getting up at 4:30am for work will drive me to decisions like that, sometimes.) I parked in a nearby lot to eat in the hopes that I could lure over some more birds, and lo! After some starlings and blackbirds had thoroughly investigated my initial peanut offering, two more crows came by and consented to be fed. Hurrah!
In both instances, though, the feeding sessions were cut short when other humans came by and the crows took flight. And these were just single humans going about their non-crow-related business! Task force, indeed. Pfft! If crows are harbingers of doom, they are the most shoo-able harbingers EVER.