It's OK to feed wild birds – here are some tips for doing it the right way

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

Whomever came up with that nonsense about cockroaches inheriting the smoking remnants of the earth we leave behind have no idea.

"If its a rook its a crow ..." Crow are mostly singletons, rooks are the social largish, black corvid. By social, I mean bird form of Peaky Blinders.

In the park opposite my house there are many large, mature trees. Several of them are home to rival gangs of rooks. There are also many magpies and some jays and some crows. The magpies seem to spontaneously form mobs but mostly couple up and do small scales raids on smaller birds if they run out of other food or for the hell of it. Jays tend to be more circumspect and I rarely spot them being nasty. I suspect they are more like assassins.

Corvids are extraordinary birds. They don't have the weaponry of hawks, so seemed to have developed intelligence and a really strong stomach instead.

Mind you the seagull (herring gull) is an even larger "crow" with amphibious capabilities. I lived in Plymouth (Devon) for some years and worked on the Barbican, so dealt with a lot of seagulls. I never got crapped on and never had a burger or chips stolen from me.

Wind forwards a fair few years. I'm doing an IT related job and am in Bristol Parkway railway station, on platform munching sandwiches during a lunch break. A gull swoops in from behind me and grabs a sarnie from my hand.

The skill and precision of the steal was remarkable. I've also seen them glide in, slow up and briefly hover over a victim, drop down and grab with their beak and then fly vertically upwards and escape. You have to admire the sheer strength of these birds. They are largely designed for soaring and gliding. Look at the aspect ratio of their wings - they are long and quite thin - more like a glider than a fighter. I suppose their association with the sea and fishing has encouraged evolving strength. Pulling a fish out of the sea is hard work. They can furl those gliding wings for bursts of speed and they have the sheer strength to do VTOL. Unlike a hawk, they do not have talons, nor a hooked beak to grab, rip and tear. Their beak instead is designed to cut things in half or cut bits out.

I could, but won't, witter on about the peregrine falcon. They are quite fast and successful.

Pigeons (rock doves) will probably have the final say after Armageddon and will clean up any corvid, and seagull waste. Including those that found cockroaches unpalatable.

[flagged]