The healthy forager

In addition to a small percentage of humans, all other animals forage. In the winter, when fewer mushrooms and edible plants are present, and my fruit stores are gradually dwindling, I’m more acutely aware of the plight of my fellow Earth inhabitants. Watching horses scrape off snow and ice with their hooves to get to (some pretty limp) grass, witnessing proper battles between pigeons, blackbirds, redwings and robins in our garden (over a fat ball full of seeds), I realise that this truly is life or death for them. Maybe not the horses, but they surely have the inborn skills to survive.

As some of you know, I have built up a very special relationship with the crows in our neighbourhood. Over the past few years I’ve come to know many as individuals, recognizing them by appearance, behaviour and sound. These all have names, of course.

When the snow came down, a couple of weeks ago, I went to them every day with pocketfuls of redskin peanuts. Within a day or so we had established a firm routine where they would fly to me from all wind directions as soon as they saw me appear on the field! Even within this large group I can make out the individual birds. There’s Halfbeak who is missing the top half of their beak (and I always make sure he/she gets lots), a very noisy Milky (who has a white patch under his left wing), Pinewood (who hatched in our garden and who is extremely territorial), Whistle (Pinewood’s chick), and my favourite, Archie (who has a speckled breast and is very tame – he usually hops behind me at no further than a foot’s distance). Here they are:

Some people might say that it’s wrong to feed the birds, and that I need to “let nature run its course”. Well, my response is that I would be happy to let nature run its course, if the rest of humanity would do the same. But these crows lost a huge part of their habitat when Dandara built their 350 luxury homes on a field that once was wild. As long as humans keep taking land that is not theirs, I will continue to feed the crows.