Man raises baby crow, realizes he's stuck with it for the next 25 years

So many ways to work this in here. Probably best left without comment.

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In my yard, the Blue Jays seem to be the most dickish. They chase other birds out of the birdbath and seem to stir up trouble.

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They also raid others’ nests. That can be lessened by tossing some eggshells on the ground near where you feed the birds.

The blue jays’ song - not warning calls - is very pretty and strange, like they have nanosynths in their throats. I hipped my Grandpa to their song, much to his surprise and delight. He’d been a science teacher, and knew a lot about birds, but he didn’t know that was their song. We were outside his place and as he bitched about blue jays, one began to sing, and I told him, “That’s a blue jay singing!” He’d heard it all his life but never knew its source. He was also pleased to learn about the eggshells.

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I just listened to the recorded calls for blue jays in iBird Pro – very interesting! I’ve certainly heard a number of them over the years, but a few of those particularly warbly synthy ones, I’m not so sure.

I highly recommend iBird Pro (smartphone app) to anyone with even a passing interest in avian dinosaurs. It’s not very expensive, and excellent! They even have an optional feature called Photo Sleuth that uses some kind of deep learning algorithm (I assume? Probably TensorFlow or similar?) to ID birds in photos you’ve taken. I haven’t tried that out yet but I will at some point. :slight_smile:

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There is no way that a corvid could ever equal the dickishness of the average parrot.

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Huginn, Muninn and their lesser-known sister Trudinn.

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We had wydahs with some society finches - figured out it would be easy to breed. Really cool birds with a dramatic change with breeding season. Sang like canaries too.

Nope. No breeding. I guess there’s a reason PetsMart doesn’t have wydahs for sale.

Our ravens, whatever variety they have in New Mexico, are awesome, huge, and I hope they never get a grudge against me.

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Only if you get it a couple of friends.

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He is a better man than I. I would have just ended up eating crow.

Brood parasites are only following the behaviours that evolution programmed into them. So not dickish.

Corvids and parrots know better. They’re dicks because they want to be, just for the lulz.

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European magpies perhaps?
I believe the song is very different to the Australian magpie.

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Eurasian, apparently.

But they shout and swear like New Jersey dockers.

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A friend of mine had a parrot growing up.

That parrot would try to take a piece out of me every time I walked by its cage. Like “clip clop” sounds as it bit the air. When it was free to roam, it would follow me around, trying to take a piece out of me. A few times I got up on a chair.

My friend’s mom would always pick up the bird and insist he was a total sweetheart.

“He’s never taken a piece out of you?” I asked once.

“Oh sure, lots of times. Look at this scar, he bit right through my ear a few years ago.”

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Caged parrots are chaotic evil, in contrast to wild parrots in groups who are merely lawful evil.

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Put a dollar in the pun jar.

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Jamaican AKA Jabberin’ crows are amazing. They’ll fill a tree and go at it. It’s hysterical!

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That’s because Australian magpies aren’t magpies. They’re not even corvids. Just a black and white bird that colonisers thought kinda looked and acted like the bird they knew from home.

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Them’s swooping words! Don’t even get me started on our ravens and crows :grin:

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Ok, checked it out and they’re passerines…
Still, don’t get me started on the ravens and crows???

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