Now, my first thought on witnessing this rather curious behavior was, 'Poor crow's turned cuckoo. Believes he's a squirrel hoarding nuts before winter.' Or worse, 'he believes he's an Indian minister, stashing his wealth under clandestine holes in the flooring away from the prying rhyncos of the the IT department.' Before the suspect shouts "Murder", let me clarify that those fears turned out to be unfounded. Members of the Corvidae and Paridae families (the latter contains birds such as chickadees and rather curiously named 'tits') are known to have multiple secret caches of food, a behavior termed as 'scatter-hoarding'. Contrary to popular belief, the birds do not steal and store shiny objects, barring a few juvenile delinquents and the occasional kleptomaniac in the murder (group of crows = murder). A couple of House Crows and a Greater Coucal cuckoo have since descended at the same spot, but neither bird could unearth the treasures lying under the rotting bamboo. The rain gods finally relented, though the sun wouldn’t- and the interplay of the sun, the moisture-laden clouds and the baked earth filled the city with the fragrance of a thousand secrets caressed close to its bosom. P.S- Apologies for the lack of photographs. Check out illustrations here.
0 Comments
|
AuthorRamblings on wildlife sharing spaces with non-wild humans Archives
December 2019
Categories
All
|