Avian musings

[graculus]

The office where I work at the moment (before I go 'on tour', as one of my managers insists on referring to my plans to be based in different offices around the city over the next few months) is situated next to a small park which is usually inhabited by an unfeasible number of crows. If you were having a bad day, it must be like being an extra on the set of The Birds.

They're entertaining creatures, though, much more amusing than the seagulls who are the other denizens. The crows walk about in a ponderous manner, their too-bright eyes taking absolutely everything in.

Personally, I've always had quite a fondness for the Corvidae - it's all the fault of Arabel's Raven. [side question: why on earth haven't the BBC released Jackanory on dvd? So many great stories, so many wonderful actors...] Mortimer, for that was the raven's name, was the awkward, authority-defying pet that every small child secretly (or not so secretly) craves. He's the pet which can do what they can't, destroying things (at one point he eats an entire flight of stairs) and breaking rules with impunity.

But much as I love crows, and their wonderfully-colourful cousins the magpies, I miss the common or garden starling. It was odd for me, when I moved to the Midlands, to see so many magpies and so few starlings and I can only assume they occupy essentially the same place in the food chain. Where I used to live, if you saw a pair of magpies in a week it was a surprise, while here they're commonplace.

I miss the iridescent cockiness of the starling, the earnest brown speckled adolescent rushing back and forth in search of imaginary food. There's an association too with my first trip abroad, a day trip to Calais as a teenager where I was horrified at the sight of boxes full of dead starlings packed in like sardines with their little scrawny legs sticking up in the air. I could never see why you'd want to eat a starling, though - surely there'd be hardly a mouthful on them?

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[sg1scribe.livejournal.com]

The starlings have all moved to Milton Keynes. They travel around in large packs terrorising entire neighbourhoods. Sometimes they blot out the sun.

I used to particularly like spring when the adolescents stand on slices of bread in our garden and squawk loudly while their parents run around snatching up bread from under the feet of other adolescents. I also had a fond place in my heart for the starlings who nested in our eaves one year and never failed to get a direct hit on our neighbour's brand new car every morning. Oddly enough neighbour failed to find this heartwarming and amusing.

Sadly spring entertainment has been curtailed by the evil that is our cat. He likes starlings too. But for cat reasons. I suspect the neighbour is bribing him.

[graculus.livejournal.com]

Yes, the adolescents are endearingly dumb, aren't they? I was wondering where they'd gone and so I can only assume they're working their way south... ;)