I HAVE A FONDNESS FOR raptors. Their deadly speed and equally deadly intent make them the purest, swiftest predators of the bird world. The name comes from the Latin rapere, which means to seize, to carry off by force or to plunder. They are beautiful outlaws. Ambitious, too. One afternoon in Elwood I pulled over my car to watch a hubbub in the air. A tawny-coloured goshawk had a turtle dove in its talons and was attempting to make off with it while the entire neighbourhood—magpies, mudlarks and mynas—mobbed the goshawk in a frenzied chorus. They had united not, I believe, to save the turtle dove but to expel an interloper. The goshawk struggled to hold the dove, which was nearly as large as itself, until, accepting defeat, it let go. The dove hit the ground and scuttled under a car. Triumphantly, the other birds chased the goshawk into the sky.
Once I passed beneath a black-shouldered kite as it sat atop a light pole at St Kilda Beach. I looked up at it and it looked fixedly down at me with its ruby-red eyes, giving me the unnerving feeling I was being assessed as a potential meal. (I do apologise, by the way, for the number of personal pronouns in this book. It’s partly because I’m no authority and have to rely on my own observations, and partly because I couldn’t figure out how else to write it, which probably amounts to the same thing. Anyway, please bear with me.)
One of the most suspenseful scenes in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park occurs when sister and brother Lex and Tim are hunted by two stealthy Velociraptors in an empty restaurant kitchen. The children’s attempts to elude and then outrun the creatures make for nail-biting cinema, especially when the camera gives a close-up of the Velociraptors’ eyes: cunning, observant and coolly murderous. In fact, the Velociraptors were not the big clever lizards that Spielberg presents. Nor were they birds but, believed to be predators, they were labelled raptor. The raptors—who existed about 70 million years ago— were around the size of a turkey, covered with feathers and sporting feathered wings. The conceit of the film, and Michael Crichton’s novel on which it was based, is that fossilised DNA can be resequenced and cloned: the past can be brought back to life.
The prehistoric bird Archaeopteryx (meaning ‘ancient wing’) is 150 million years old. In The Life of Birds, David Attenborough takes us to the limestone quarry in the Bavarian region of southern Germany where Archaeopteryx was unearthed in 1877. The quarry manager sold the fossil to Ernst Häberlein, an amateur collector, for a pittance. After a bidding war, orchestrated by Häberlein, Archaeopteryx was sold to the Humboldt Museum of Natural History in Berlin where it resides today.
Fittingly, art is behind the discovery of this, the first bird. The prints that John and Elizabeth Gould made for their high-quality illustrations required limestone—the perfect medium for detailed lithographic printing. Solnhofen, where Archaeopteryx was found, has been quarried for paving stones since Roman times. But, as anthropologist Pat Shipman points out, it was only when lithography became popular in the nineteenth century that the fine-grained stones were rendered valuable rather than just useful. Solnhofen limestone is so smooth that it will take the sharpest lines, conveying the subtlest textures that can be created by the artist’s hand. As a result, a painstaking process of hand-quarrying began (and continues today) that led directly to the discovery of Archaeopteryx and many other fine fossils. Each slab of Solnhofen limestone is chiselled out by hand, split, inspected for flaws, sorted, and then often trimmed further to the exact dimensions required for the printing process. From start to finish, sometimes as many as a dozen skilled quarrymen examine each surface of each slab with care; as a result, even if they are not intentionally sought fossils are not missed as Pat Shipman notes. ‘Only the coincidence of the artist and of Archaeopteryx accounts for this fact.’1 More mechanical quarrying—the rule elsewhere—would have certainly destroyed the fossil.
Archaeopteryx is dazzling. Caught in stone, the skeleton appears to be dancing in graceful abandon on its long, elegant legs. With its head thrown back, its wings swirl like diaphanous veils from its raised arms. Pat Shipman memorably describes it as a ‘two-dimensional sculpture of a fabulous chimera, half-bird, half-reptile’ showing ‘ligaments, tendons, skin and feathers pressed almost flat between the rocks of the ages’.2
Archaeopteryx is such an important find because it marks the evolutionary transition between reptiles and birds: it shows feathers attached to the body. About the size of a magpie, it has a reptilian head with bony jaws and teeth but it walked and perched like a bird, perhaps even glided. Archaeopteryx wasn’t the first creature that flew: that honour belongs to the insects. Pterosaurs (winged lizards) coexisted with Archaeopteryx for millions of years—some lived alongside Archaeopteryx in the Solnhofen lagoon—but the great sails of the pterosaurs’ wings were made of skin and if they hit the water as they hunted for fish, they could drown. Nor could the pterosaurs compete with the ability of Archaeopteryx to feed in the restricted terrain of the forest, one of the many factors that contributed to the pterosaurs’ demise. With its mix of old, reptilian features and new, birdlike assets Archaeopteryx was destined to (briefly) become a winner in the struggle for survival. Darwin had the good fortune to be able to comment on Archaeopteryx, ‘this strange bird’, in the fourth edition of On the Origin of Species. Subsequently, Archaeopteryx became a key piece of evidence in the debate over evolution.
There are two hypotheses about the ancestry of the first bird. Archaeopteryx was descended either from the dinosaurs, which is known as the ‘ground up’ hypothesis, or from a treedwelling glider, known as the ‘trees down’ hypothesis. Both theories have been hotly contested. But a remarkable discovery in China in 1996 has convinced many of the ‘ground up’ argument. In the remote hills of Liaoning province, north-east of Beijing, fossils of small feathered dinosaurs have been found that are around 124 million years old. While Archaeopteryx is older and did not descend from the feathered dinosaurs, this shows that some species of dinosaurs were developing avian characteristics. Next time you see an aggressive bird like a myna hopping about the streets, remember—once were dinosaurs.
We also know that dinosaurs made nests. In 2006, had you been cashed up you could have purchased a 65-million-year-old dinosaur nest in mint condition from an auction house in Los Angeles. It would have set you back US$420,000. The nest, unearthed in Guangdong province in southern China, had been restored to museum quality by its owner, and embryonic remains were revealed in most of the twenty-two eggs. Some eggs were so well preserved that the curled-up embryos were visible inside. The female dinosaur made a circular depression in moist earth where she deposited the eggs, usually in a circle around the edge. In some cases, it is thought the parent settled herself on top to keep them warm and brooded the young until they hatched. In others, she covered the eggs with vegetation or allowed natural forces like sun or the mud in which the eggs were buried to create the right temperature for incubation. Many spectacular dinosaur nesting sites have been discovered from Mongolia to Argentina. In some cases, entire nesting colonies have been preserved because they were caught in natural disasters like sandstorms, floods or volcanic eruptions.
The Oviraptor, discovered in Mongolia in the 1920s, was mistakenly given the name of ‘egg thief’ because that’s what she seemed to be doing—stealing eggs from a nest. Recently, it’s been considered that the skeleton, found poised above the nest, could have been a brooding parent protecting her own eggs rather than trying to eat them. Around the same size as a Velociraptor, she had a beak that made her look like a big perky parrot and she may have had feathers. Maiasaura had better luck in the naming stakes. Discovered in northern Montana, she was the subject of a book co-authored by Jack Horner, the palaeontologist adviser for the Jurassic Park movies. Poetically named for the Greek goddess Maia, the mother of Hermes, Maiasaura roughly means ‘good mother lizard’. She was so named because she supplied the first proof that giant dinosaurs raised and fed their young.3 Eighty million years ago, Maiasaura lived in flocks and bred in nesting colonies packed closely together like those of modern seabirds such as silver gulls or albatrosses.
Horner discovered that the Maiasaura females gathered in birdlike flocks before building their nests, which were spaced seven metres apart. First the Maiasaurs made mounds almost two metres wide which they hollowed out for the eggs. The females then arranged vegetation, covering the nest and keeping the eggs warm until they hatched. The babies had to stay in the nest for at least a month until they were large enough to fend for themselves, and both parents must have stayed nearby to protect them from predators.
I asked Professor Patricia Vickers-Rich for her opinion about Horner’s research. Pat trained at San Francisco’s Berkeley University before joining Monash University where she founded the Monash Science Centre and where she has a chair of palaeontology. Pat is a warm, brisk, good-humoured woman with a mop of silvery-gold hair and clear blue eyes. Her husband, Dr Thomas Rich, is a senior curator at the Melbourne Museum. They’re a formidable team. In 2000, National Geographic awarded them the Committee for Research and Exploration Chairman’s Award in recognition of ‘their tireless and virtually superhuman efforts to gather and interpret fossils of great significance’.4
Since the 1980s, Pat and Tom have been working on a site called Dinosaur Dreaming near Inverloch on the Victorian coast. Teams of volunteers, under the direction of Leslie Kool, make annual digs which have yielded fertile results. There’s been the discovery of the small theropod Leaellynasaura, which Pat and Tom named after their daughter, Leaellyn, and the mysterious ornithomimid Timimus, named for their son. When Pat and Tom ran out of children to name their dinosaurs after, they turned to the national airline and called a two-legged, plant-eating dinosaur Qantassaurus.
Pat was the first person with whom I discussed this book. I thought if people were going to consider me crazy for saying that birds are artists, I might as well start at the top. Pat and I met over coffee on campus and I babbled, a fault of mine when I’m nervous, especially in the presence of an august individual. Pat gently corrected my ignorance—all sorts of creatures make nests and birds were not the first—plus she wasn’t comfortable with the whole notion of ‘firsts’ anyway. When I outlined the idea for the book, she was disarmingly encouraging. I’ve found that imaginative folk, in whatever academic discipline or walk of life you meet them, have few boundaries when it comes to unusual ideas. Such adventurously-minded people make great teachers and are heartening to be around. When I asked Pat if I was taking up too much of her time with my dumb questions, she laughed, ‘No, you’re cute!’ Pat and Tom have not found dinosaur nests at their site. She supports Horner’s conclusions but points out that questions remain: did feathered dinosaurs exist in the Mesozoic era? Did theropods make nests?
In the late 1990s, palaeontologists Luis Chiappe and Lowell Dingus discovered a vast dinosaur hatchery in the rocky south Argentine desert. They’d gone searching for fossilised birds but instead stumbled upon a nursery that stretched for kilometres. There were so many eggs, it was difficult to take a step without breaking one. Around 90 million years ago, hundreds if not thousands of giant sauropod dinosaurs had gathered to build nests in a fertile plain cut with shallow streams. Those dinosaurs did not incubate the nest—they let the sun do that, rather like modern alligators. At birth, the baby sauropod dinosaur was around 40 centimetres in length, and grew to a whopping 30 metres long.
Among modern birds, the brush turkey, another large megapode bird, also makes a mound of twigs, leaf litter and soil, in this case a hatchery with a precisely controlled temperature. Their name literally means large foot (Greek: mega = large, poda = foot) and refers to the heavy legs and feet typical of these flightless birds. The brush turkey’s destruction of the bowerbird’s nest was mentioned in the first chapter; as the male turkey takes five months to make its own nest, an extraordinarily long period of time for avian construction, it made me wonder, watching him create havoc in the bowerbird’s boudoir, whether some element of competition was involved. With his powerful legs, the brush turkey flicks his nest into shape, periodically flattening and compacting it, until he has built a mound around four metres in diameter and over one metre high. Take that, satin bowerbird! In the warm damp forest, the nest rapidly ferments; while the temperature is initially much higher than necessary for incubation, it gradually falls until it is thirty-three degrees Celsius. That’s no accident either as the brush turkey, who has a heat sensor inside his upper bill, digs test holes to check the heat. If it’s too hot, he removes material to allow heat to escape and if it’s too cool, he heaps more onto the mound.
By domesticating some animals, we have formed great alliances. The horse changed human history. Wolves became dogs and thus our best friends. Cats, with their vanity and self-possession, seem to have chosen us. Birds, however, unless we cage them, are not usually interested in being tamed. Maybe the cockatoo, with its intelligence and its wry sense of humour, takes pleasure in being our companion, perched in a living room and mimicking our voices after its wings have been clipped; pigeons, docile and amiable, have been trained for centuries. Like many Australian children, I grew up with caged budgerigars as pets. Poor Bluey—as he or she was inevitably named—never lasted very long. Either we fed him too much or too little or the cat harassed him to death. It’s a practice I now find odious: birds are not meant to be kept in cages. But many species of birds prefer to leave a habitat than to try to adapt to our ways. Adaptation through natural selection has not made birds keen to associate with us or to become our pets.
Ravens are something of an exception, as Charles Dickens knew. In Barnaby Rudge, the eponymous protagonist has a pet raven called Grip that he carries in a basket on his back. Dickens confessed that Grip was ‘a compound of two great originals, of whom I was, at different times, the proud possessor’. Dickens’ first raven slept in the stable, preferably on horseback, and so terrified Dickens’ dog that the bird could, ‘by the mere superiority of his genius’, walk off unmolested with the dog’s dinner, literally swiped from beneath the dog’s nose. After that raven’s accidental death, Dickens was inconsolable until a friend found in a pub in Yorkshire another tame raven, ‘older and more gifted’, that he bought for Dickens. After raven number two had dug up all the cheese and coins that his predecessor had buried in the garden—‘a work of immense labour and research, to which he devoted all the energies of his mind’—the bird then ‘applied himself to the acquisition of [coach-driver’s] language, in which he soon became such an adept, that he would perch outside my window and drive imaginary horses with great skill, all day.’5 The intelligence of crows is well documented and, like the satin bowerbird, they have been the subject of scientific research. Distinguishing between ‘raven’ and ‘crow’ is rather confusing. Crows account for the entire family of birds known as corvids, which includes the raven species, and while that means all ravens are crows, crows can be ravens, jays or rooks. In Australia, we call Australian ravens ‘crows’ and the only major difference between them and their Northern Hemisphere relatives is their white eyes. Crows evolved in central Asia and then spread through Australia, Europe, Africa and North America. It depends on the poetic leaning of the writer which name they assign the bird. Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Raven’ is a gothic figure of paranoid hallucination to the melancholic young man whom it visits. By the poem’s end, as the young man descends into delusion, the raven proves to be a psychopomp to an underworld of madness. Ted Hughes’ post-Holocaustal Crow, from his cycle From the Life and Songs of the Crow, is a bleak, amoral, Dionysian man-bird who can outwit both God and death, and who boasts about it.
In myth and folklore, crows have been represented as tricksters and, latterly and more fearfully, as portents of doom and embodiments of destruction and violence. But their intelligence is never in doubt. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian poem which dates from the third millennium BC, is the earliest record of human literature. On his journey to seek eternal life, Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtim, who has survived a terrifying flood which the gods loosed to destroy mankind. To test the waters had receded, Utnapishtim first released a dove, which returned, then a swallow, and finally a raven, which provided the necessary proof. ‘She saw that the waters had retreated, she ate, she flew around, she cawed and she did not come back.’6
To Native American people on the Pacific Northwest Coast the raven is a powerful creator figure, whose myth, similar to a tale about a raven in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, explains how the bird, once white, became black. In the Haida people’s version of the story, Raven seeks to save humanity by stealing the sun, the moon and the stars, as well as a firebrand, from Grey Eagle, who hated humans and kept the valuable items to himself. After hanging the sun in the sky and then fastening the moon there after the sun had set, Raven flew across the world with the firebrand, the smoke causing his feathers to turn black. In Roman mythology, the raven’s fate is a judgement on its chattering indiscretion. Once of a ‘silvery hue, with such snowy feathers that it could rival any spotless dove’, the bird was turned black as a punishment by Apollo after it informed him that his lover Coronis had been unfaithful.7 (Coronis fared much worse: Apollo killed her with an arrow.) In both tales, the birds are messengers and in the latter, one that’s too smart for its own good. Interestingly, before the raven is changed to sable by Apollo, a crow, who was herself human before being transformed into a bird, warns the raven of the danger of telling tales, even if it’s done with the best of intentions. The raven ignores her advice.
The reputation of crows as evil angels is historically well founded, based on the birds’ predilection for carrion. Soldiers going into battle knew that if they died their bodies could be scavenged by crows. During the fourteenth century, the population of Europe was decimated by the bubonic plague, history’s worst pandemic, which took around 100 million lives. It was not a pretty sight. Stinking corpses riddled with sores that had oozed black pus were dragged from their houses, or from the streets where they fell, and flung on the carts destined for the hastily dug mass graves. The crows were there, waiting for the dead. Perhaps this is why a flock of crows is known as a ‘murder’, while the collective noun for ravens is an ‘unkindness’ or a ‘storytelling’. The English seem to have quelled their fear of ravens, and several magnificent examples, standing at around a metre high, provide a tourist attraction at the Tower of London. (The tale that England will fall without their presence, ascribed to Charles II, is perhaps due to their reputation as messengers, nosey, noisy, alert reporters.) Attended by their personal Ravenmaster who feeds them raw meat and biscuits soaked in blood, the birds spend each night in a raven hotel. In such luxurious surroundings, the birds can live up to forty years. However, not all the ravens make the grade. In 1986, Raven George was dismissed for ‘conduct unsatisfactory’ and sent to the Welsh Mountain Zoo.8 He’d been caught demolishing television aerials.
Over the centuries, as humans needed to hunt less, our relationship with crows changed, a factor which may account for their demonisation. To the Inuit, ravens were once part of their hunting strategy, the birds often alerting them to the presence of prey such as caribou or polar bears. The Inuit believed that if they invoked the ravens with a secret name imparted by a shaman, the bird would assist them. The hunters rewarded the birds by leaving choice morsels for them to eat. Odin, ruler of the Norse gods, was also known as the Raven god. He kept a bird on each shoulder, named Hugin (thought), and Munin (memory). Every morning Odin sent them far and wide: they ranged across the inhabited world, questioning the living and the dead, returning at evening to bring their master the news of the world, like an ancient version of Wikileaks. They also accompanied Odin into battle. For the Vikings, ravens were omens for a successful raid. In his book Mind of the Raven, Bernd Heinrich, a biologist who can only be described as a raven-obsessive, recounts an Eskimo tale. A hunter who wants to settle near some seal breathing holes he has found in the ice is told by a raven precisely where to camp. The hunter foolishly heeds the raven and camps where directed. In the night he is killed by a boulder falling from the mountain above. The raven then flies down and pecks out the hunter’s eyes, saying, ‘I don’t know why all these hunters believe my silly stories.’9
There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence for the cleverness of crows. In 1999, Ann and Wallace Collito from North Attleboro, Massachusetts, found an abandoned black and white kitten wandering in their garden. The following day they were astonished when the kitten trotted into the yard accompanied by a crow. As the cat relaxed on the lawn, the crow hunted for worms and, very carefully, fed them to her. When the Collitos told their disbelieving vet of what they’d seen, he encouraged them to make a video; the result is on YouTube. The crow, perhaps itself an orphan, has assumed the role of parent, feeding and caring for the kitten. As the pair cross the road, the crow becomes anxious that the kitten is straggling and gives her a peck to make her move faster. The crow and the kitten roll in the grass, teasing one another and playing hilarious games of hide and seek. When Ann Collito began feeding the kitten meat, the crow ate too, but only after it had made sure that the kitten had eaten her fill.
Groundbreaking new research offers insights into crows’ canniness. Nicky Clayton is Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University and a fellow of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s oldest and most prestigious science society. Her research on the behaviour of jays, a crow relative, has led her to believe that they have complex cognitive abilities such as episodic memory—the recall of an actual moment in time rather than simply the ability to learn a skill or a fact. Episodic memory uses the same structures in the human brain’s hippocampus as does imagination. It demonstrates the capacity for mental time travel, the ability to recall past events or envision new ones. Clayton’s experiments, reports Charles Wohlforth, raise for the first time the possibility that jays can mentally time travel too. ‘We thought these abilities were uniquely human. The fact that jays have them says no,’ Clayton comments.10
Clayton has focused on the jays’ ability to hide and then find food, a technique called ‘caching’. Collaborating with Tony Dickinson, a comparative psychologist at Cambridge, Clayton showed in 1998 that the cognitive capacities of the scrub jays she studied included the ability to negotiate the passage of time. She found that the birds would return to caches when the food they had hidden was about to spoil. The jays also adjusted their retrieval pattern when presented with new information about how quickly a certain food goes bad, abandoning those caches whose contents had passed their use-by dates.11 Together with her husband Dr Nathan Emery, a research fellow at Cambridge, Clayton has investigated the latent intelligence of corvids by testing rooks, which do not use tools in the wild, with complex tasks requiring tools. With each step in Emery and Clayton’s laboratory experiments, the challenges got harder and more complicated, and the rooks solved every one. In an experiment inspired by Aesop’s fables, the rooks were presented with a worm floating out of reach in a large tube of water. The birds put rocks in the tube to raise the water level to capture the worm. They even manufactured tools, bending a wire to make a hook to pull a bucket holding food out of the tube. The tool worked only with a bend of precise curvature, around a hundred degrees. Emery comments, ‘We wouldn’t have expected that at all . . . It is an example of insight. It’s coming up with a novel solution, to innovate.’12 Indeed, Clayton and Emery have argued that the intelligence of corvids is on a par with that of non-human apes, and the pair refer to them as ‘feathered apes’.13
Clayton’s connection with birds goes beyond the laboratory. She’s a scientist by day and a tango dancer by night. In 2009, her twin passions for birds and dance combined when she was invited by London’s Rambert Dance Company to collaborate with artistic director Mark Baldwin on the choreography of a new work. She taught the dancers ‘tango moves inspired by our feathered friends’.14 The result was a dance performance, The Comedy of Change, that celebrated Darwin’s bicentenary.15 Birds, Clayton observes, spend a lot of time dancing. The male blue manakin of Argentina, fittingly the home of the tango, are reported to spend about 90 per cent of their time dancing, with moves that take them around eight years to perfect and that are taught by an older male. The dancing is not only concerned with natural selection but sexual selection as well. In the branches, the males perform elaborate dancing duels observed by an audience of critical females—‘only the top-notch dancers get to mate’.16
If corvids are so clever, what kind of nests do they make? At his home in Vermont, Bernd Heinrich had the good fortune to watch two of his tamed ravens build a nest and breed. Fuzz and Houdi were crazy about each other, preening one another constantly and spending all their time together. (Preening has a practical purpose—the bird’s sharp beak cleans the parasites from its mate’s feathers—and it’s also an intimate bonding ritual, similar to the grooming that apes perform on one another. For humans, it would be the next best thing to holding hands and smooching, signifying pleasure in and possession of one’s partner.) In Heinrich’s large aviary, Houdi, the female, selected a site inside a shed where she deposited several twigs while Fuzz watched attentively. Over the following weeks, Fuzz alone did the work of carrying the sticks and arranging them, rather casually, in a basket-like shape. There was as much play as work involved and Heinrich wondered whether the two were up to the serious business of making a nest and starting a family. What was missing? During winter in the wild, ravens insulate their deep nests with the soft warmth of fur. To help the couple along, Heinrich placed in the aviary an old sheepskin. Both birds examined the material intently. Houdi shredded some of the wool before depositing it in the nest while Fuzz grabbed sticks and carried them to the nest. The sheepskin triggered a burst of activity and the birds began building the nest with a will and lining it with the wool. Heinrich also supplied the birds with dead grass—which Houdi carried to the nest in one large load—and a stick of wood from an ash tree, which she stripped of bark before arranging it in the nest. The final result was impressive, more than half a metre high, with a nest cup measuring fifteen centimetres. A few weeks later, Houdi lay five pear-shaped, sea-coloured eggs; Fuzz fed her while she brooded. When the nestlings hatched, both parents catered for them by tearing meat from animal carcasses supplied by Heinrich, and fed themselves only once the babies were replete.
Though wild ravens choose a crag or a tree, crows, as urban dwellers, are pragmatists and can nest on powerlines, on radar towers, on buildings above busy streets, under highway overpasses and in abandoned buildings. Crows’ nests are sometimes described as untidy, perhaps due to the preponderance of twigs protruding at all angles, but, as Lyanda Lynn Haupt points out, up close the effect is more intricate, purposeful and mandala-like than it appears from below. She also observed that, where she was able to distinguish male from female, the female manages most of the fine-tuning in the arrangement of nest sticks. The female accomplishes this secretly after the male, satisfied with the placement, has flown off to gather more. She watches him leave, then moves his most recent additions to suit her own taste. Haupt reasons, ‘We females normally have to brood the young . . . It makes sense that we would be fussier about what sticks were poking us where.’17 After arranging the nest sticks in the fork of a tree, Haupt’s crow neighbours then lined their nests with bark, moss, pieces of string or yarn, shreds of paper and, occasionally, fur from roadkill. Perhaps the exterior is armoured like a bulwark against predators—raptors such as eagles and owls are especially fond of corvids—and the deep, safe, warm pocket assures the nestlings the best chance of survival.
I’m thankful to Haupt for her records because crows are secretive about their nest building and I’ve had little luck in observing them. Walking back to my car from busy South Melbourne Market one Sunday morning, I observed a crow stripping a large twig from a tree branch above my head. I put down my bags and gazed upwards. As soon as the crow saw that I was watching, it stopped its work and cawed loudly for its mate. The mate duly arrived and the two had a conference—probably along the lines of, ‘Bloody human! Why doesn’t she take her shopping and get lost?’ Then they flew to the cornice of a nearby building and waited until I picked up my bags and walked away.