Day before yesterday my wife witnessed a murder in the orchard between the house we are camping in and the one 50 yards away that has wifi (we sit in an apartment connected to the house to do our communicating, or when that's occupied, as now, in the car on the hard parking nearby).
She said she had seen two large crows attacking another bird. Walking through the orchard half an hour later I passed a pigeon that was all there apart from having no head and being partly turned inside out. During the rest of the day cats, and no doubt the crows, returned to the corpse and removed bits of it. By the end of the day there were just a few feathers and a brown stain on the slippery brick path.
Later I saw the miscreants, magnificent in appearance but deeply unpleasant. They reminded me in their strutting, cock-of-the-walk demeanour and arrogant, nasty expressions of the young Kray twins in expensive new black whistles got for nothing from some hapless East End tailor. For 24 hours I was toying with the idea of borrowing a shooter and putting them down. I was worried about the small birds in the garden, the ones that sing.
But yesterday I decided to reprieve them for the time being. They are a pair of young ravens I think, born last spring. I saw them both in the orchard again with their (greying, smaller, faded) mother who may have been murmuring provocatively: now calm down boys, don't upset people... The thing that made me let them off was the sight of a greater spotted woodpecker and three blue tits eating nuts unmolested from one of those thingies people hang up.
Mind you if they messed with a woodpecker they might learn that beaks and neck muscles don't have to be big to do damage.
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