(don't) Stone The Crows!

'I love rooks,' said the Wart. 'It is funny, but I think they are my favourite birds.'
'Why?' asked Archimedes.
'Well, I like them. I like their sauce.'

(The Once and Future King by T.H. White)

I like crows too. They can be sombre and dignified - plodding along the roadside dressed in undertaker black, with their hands behind their backs, they could be searching the ground for worms or for specimens for their fossil collection. They can also be 'larky mobs' as Wart says; in Tramore one stormy summer evening, we watched a group of them surfing on the air currents at the shore.

I'm working on a project about crows, which I hope will result in a small cafe-type exhibition, and maybe some cards and other stationery. I am going to keep this blog updated with my progress.

This morning I went to the Phoenix Park to take some photos. Crows are extremely wary, something I never noticed about them until I tried to study them. As soon as you show interest in a crow, it flaps away. However, they can be tamed to some degree. They are very good at recognising people, which means you can build up a relationship with individuals over time. My plan is to find one small group and offer them food fairly regularly.

It was surprisingly hard to find any crows, and at first I only saw jackdaws. I eventually came across three hooded crows. When I approached them, they flew over to a hawthorn tree and watched me from there. I threw some peanuts on the ground but, as I already knew by that stage, they weren't going to come near me to eat them. One crow flew over behind me and the other got a higher look-out from a nearby goal post. Why not draw pigeons? They'll toddle right up to anyone, just on the off-chance that you might drop a crumb.

To make it absolutely clear that the food came from me, I put a piece of white paper on the ground, secured it with some mown grass, and placed a few peanuts in the centre. It felt a bit like making an offering. Do you think people used altars to attract the attention of gods - sort of a 'Hey! Here's your food!' - or to make it really clear what was being offered, and what wasn't - i.e. 'Here's yours, now leave mine alone'?

The three crows formed a large triangle with the paper at the centre. They flew low around it, and passed low over it a few times. Obviously satisfied with their findings, they closed in and ate the peanuts. They still scarpered when I walked back over to collect the paper.

I'll be checking back at the tree in the next few days. Although I was hoping to find black crows, I'm happy to have found these three. 'Hooded crow' is such a satisfyingly dramatic name, fit for a villain. The fact that there are three of them resonates with the traditional ballad, 'The Three Ravens', which I especially like at the moment because it in turn reminds me of a spine-tingling Wild Beasts' song, 'His Grinning Skull'

I went to the tea rooms next, partly for tea and partly because I know jackdaws tend to loiter there. When I got there, there was one single bird, who flew off when I photographed him. I rolled a peanut on the ground beside the table and he reappeared. Jackdaws seem to respond more quickly to bribery with food, but it could have been that I was sitting down, and there was a fence to perch on and hide behind. Whatever the reason, within five or ten minutes and with an outlay of about ten peanuts, I had five jackdaws staring meaningfully at my bag. I put one peanut on the table to see if any of them would take it. It was there maybe three minutes when one bird, from his perch on the fence, swooped over the table, rested for half a second, and grabbed it before continuing on to the ground on the far side of the table.

I got a good few photos of greedy-looking birds. Jackdaws, like other corvids, have beautiful iridescent colours in their plumage. They look a bit like they have shawls draped over their shoulders, and if you think of them in this way, the darker fringe around the end of the shawl gleams a dark metallic blue. The grey feathers above this can have a soft bloom of purple. These colours don't come from pigments, they are caused by the refraction of light; corvid feathers are structured in such a way that they act a bit like prisms. This is the same reason a kingfisher looks blue.

If you are going to invite birds over to your table you should be prepared to clean up the resulting poo. Which was, in the case of today's jackdaws, an intriguing lilac colour.