Nuthin to crow about...

I think I might hate crows. I know, I know, that is a terrible thing to be saying about some of God’s wee creatures, but they annoy me…a lot.

Okay, so maybe hate is too strong a word but I don’t think ‘strongly detest’ or dislike is strong enough.

Worse than me coming to realise that I might happen to hate them though, is my annoyance at myself for letting these creatures get on my nerves so much.

They are, after all, pretty darn stupid. Well at least that’s we’re led to believe.

I mean come off it now, any bird that can scared away by an old coat tied to a stick must be pretty dumb.

Yet, dumb and all as they might be, they have succeeded in getting on my nerves.

That’s because there is a large tree outside my house, which these crows seem to have decided is an ideal stopping point both late in the evening and early in the morning.

They have been using the tree for years now as some kind of a roadside or I mean airside rest spot, (or maybe it’s a crow-bar!) and there are certain times that they appear to get noisier and noisier.

The scientific reason for why they gather like this is apparently all guesswork.

Well at least when I asked ‘the google’ the best I could get was a whole bunch of theories, but it seems that crows have been gathering like this in roosts for, well as long as there have been crows. (Apparently their feathers and their fore feathers have been doing this for years!)

Some say it is the old safety in numbers thing, protection from predators, some meanwhile suggest that these crows get together to share information on where they might best get food.

I’ve been thinking that if they keep this up over the winter it might be where they might get killed, despite their safety in numbers thing.

Well okay that was pretty dramatic.

I mean how the heck would I kill 200 crows in the tree in one go anyway, it was just a badly thought out idle threat.

Still, I wonder is that where they get their collective name from…a murder of crows?

The thought of electrocution did cross my mind, but it all seems so complicated as to how they can sit on those wires and survive, so the best I could come up with to get rid of them was a kind of home made solution.

And that is, when the noise gets to the point where I can no longer take it any more, I open the window and try to scare them away.

I no longer shout at them though.

That method stopped promptly after the time I stood at the front door roaring ‘go on, get away from here,’ which prompted no reaction from the stupid crows but saw one terrified girl out for an early morning walk, scuttle past my gate in terror.

Now I clap. I know it’s pathetic, but it works. Well kinda.

I just open the window or the door and I clap as loud as I can and the panic starts and they kinda half-think about staying but another clap comes and they go. I told you they were dumb.

Well they were dumb, but this past week they seem to have decided that it’s just an oul scare tactic and more and more of them have been sitting tight in the tree.

It got to the point where I no longer just opened the window, but actually went out to the garden to try to scare them away, but they seem to go when they are good and ready and not when I want them to.

Running out of ideas I wondered if there was any way I could get these crows evicted from my tree, but apparently not.

Seems as if they have a ‘caws’ in a contract that says otherwise….