This photo of my TV shows the front entrance camera, with the lights nearby reflecting in the puddles on the doorstep. The weather forecast says a few light showers, followed by four days of heavy rain, with a weather warning about this being the first big rainstorm of the autumn season. Like we couldn't tell from the water running down our backs giving us wet asses underneath a dark and dreary overcast sky.
But it's not all bad - the air's nice and fresh, there's no dust, it's easy to shovel, unlike the snow they get back on the flatlands, or up in the hills here when it gets cooler, and the fir trees around here just love it - they grow several feet in a year just because of all this moisture in our rainforest.
And I forgot to mention the seagulls - a couple come to my windowsill sometimes, to grab the bread I put out there for the local crows. And those crows actually come when I call them. If I put three or four slices of bread on the windowsill and then whistle my special call, nearby crows come from half a block away to pick it up and 'airlift' it all over the neighborhood. One likes to pull the slices apart, and dunk the pieces into a neighbor's rain gutter, to soften them up for easier swallowing. Another takes its bread back to a nest in a tall fir down the block, and a couple just sit on the windowsill and eat it right here.
That all began about ten years ago when a pair of love-sick crows made a nest in the top of a fir tree below my window. This being a busy suburban neighborhood, without a lot of readily available munchies for the birds, I began tossing slices of bread out to them in the mornings. From my window
160 feet or so above the ground, a slice of bread can be Frisbee'd across our
back driveway, over the trees along our side of the back street, and into that back street, where the crows picked it up and enjoyed their snack. I really didn't realize what I'd started. Seemingly before I really became aware of it,
That pair had multiplied into half a dozen, and then a dozen, and then well,
you get the idea. A little gal I got talking to about it told me that crows can raise up to three batches of young in a single year, and now, that flock of crows is my personal version of the Strategic Air Command.
It covers the neighborhood like a tent, delivering fresh 75% whole wheat bread to rooftops and chimney caps for blocks around, and providing the local bluejays and squirrels with snacks from their leftovers. There's a black squirrel across the street that actually confronts crows on the ground to get their bread. One crow even became adept at 'in-flight refueling', being able to catch a flying slice of bread in mid air and then air-lifting it right out of the area before anything else could get it. The bread isn't that expensive, and the show is more than worth it.
In answer to Uncle Ron's comment here, I dug up these from the files. They aren't taken on the new camera, but they do show the birds on the porch...
I tell you what...Like I said in a previous comment...I never know what Ray is going to write about in his blog till I read it...I remeber the pix you took of the gulls who freqented your balconey window but I don't remember any crow pix...Maybe you will honor us with some taken with your new Nikon...Shalom...
ReplyDeleteHave a good day Ray...
Well Bite My Tongue!!!You sure did take some crow shots...Which reminds me of the first (and only) time I ever went hunting...I was 22 then and staying in my older brother John's home...His oldest son Joey (age 12)and I went hunting on a farm a few miles out of town...It belonged to my sister-in-law's uncle...He asked us to shoot any crows we might come across in our venture...To make a long story short...We killed 2 squirrels, 1 rabbit and 1 crow...I've never gone hunting since...My nephew Joey on the other hand is an avid deer and turkey hunter...
ReplyDelete@ Uncle Ron -
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid in my teens, I was a blood-thirsty little bugger, and I saved up the almost-invisible profits from my paper route until I had enough to buy a new Marlin 18-shot lever-action .22 rifle, with which I practiced steadily until I could knock a Carnation Condensed Milk can off the corner fence post at the back of our half-acre lot from our back porch, which was about 45 yards from that post with the can on top.
In those days, we could do that, because there was nothing behind our lot but a mile or so of second-growth poplar and spruce, with a few rabbits and partridge,and a big flock of crows with a rookery about a half a mile away, near a big municipal water tank further along on the hilltop ridge on the west side of town, where we lived.
Back then, we studied 'Outdoor Life' and other hunting and fishing magazines, and listened to all the stories our fathers or uncles told of their own often-wildly-exaggerated adventures in
the great outdoors. We imagined ourselves becoming famous hunters or fishermen, or perhaps skillful guides for the rich & famous. And we almost never actually shot & killed anything except tin cans or empty bottles, but we certainly could have, 'if we wanted to'.
Later on, I hunted deer and moose almost every annual season for years, and I saw them in their natural habitat plenty of times,
often quite close to me. I'd stop, aim the rifle, hold my breath, and then ask myself "Do I really want to kill this thing and then have to carry it all the way back to the road, and then home, and butcher it, and get rid of the parts we can't eat? Hell No!" And then I'd usually say something to it, like "Lookin' Good, - See you around!" And we'd turn and leave in opposite directions. I saved carrying many hundreds of pounds of freshly killed animals that way, and yet I still had the thrill of meeting them in the wild and admiring them fairly close up, before parting company with them again. I wish I'd had one of these modern digital cameras back then. I could have taken some great pictures. But I had to give that up eventually, because it got too difficult making up believable excuses for why I hunted so much, and was such a good shot, but never came home with fresh meat.