The reason for the collective noun.

[hannah]

I'd known crows ate meat, and I'd assumed crows ate fresh meat if they could get it, and it wasn't until today I saw a crow eating the freshest meat possible: something it'd managed to catch and kill. Something small enough it could fly off with it safely. It'd caught another bird.

I wasn't that close and I hadn't seen it do the catching, but I was able to watch a little bit of the end of the action: the crow with someone brown and smaller than itself in its beak, other birds making a racket, the crow shaking what it'd caught and flying off into the trees to have some privacy.

It was probably a sparrow. It could've been a juvenile robin. Birds from a distance can be hard to distinguish. All I knew was I saw something wild happen, and I'm grateful that I did.

Comments

[karalee]

Pretty cool! I didn't know any of this.

[yourlibrarian]

I find this unsurprising -- I know that the sparrows that come to our food plate are very wary of them. The crows have rarely come to our balcony but the other birds are not to be found when they do. But yeah, certainly the time of year for babies to be taken as well.