Margaret's column yesterday: Birds...

There's more, and you can find it all right here.

I'm a bird-lover myself, and I don't mean the kind that wear miniskirts - well, those too, - but for the purposes of this discussion, I'm referring to my own personal 'air force'. A flock of neighborhood crows, and therein lies a tale.....

It began about ten or twelve years ago. Two crows made a nest in the top of a big evergreen below my 16th floor window, right between our rear driveway leading to two other buildings and a city street along the border with West Vancouver. Not the best place for a nest with little ones. So I decided to help out by tossing them a few slices of bread every morning. 

Those two crows rather quickly became a whole flock of about two dozen, and those few slices of bread became a loaf or a loaf and a half each morning, especially in the winter, when natural foods are hard to find. And instead of that tree below my window, they began visiting my balcony rail and window sill, and I've become a guy with his own flock of crows who come when I whistle at them. They can airlift a loaf of bread all over the neighborhood as fast as I can put it out there. If I'm not paying attention when they get hungry, a couple of them will sit in a nearby treetop and call to me until I respond. I'm almost part of the family. Or a guy with his own air force.