Wednesday 15 August 2012

Goose stepping



A funny thing happened on my patch this morning. I watched a Greylag fly in and land on the football pitches. It was immediately swamped by a posse of Carrion Crows - I counted around 50 at one point - who surrounded the goose and followed its every move.

Each species was weirded out by the other. The crows were thinking; 'what is this big thing', whereas the goose must of thought that this was some kind of strange welcoming committee Wormwood Scrubs style.

Eventually, the goose got bored and flew off strongly to the west leaving the crow bandits firmly on the deck.

Anyone else out there ever experienced the like?

5 comments:

holdingmoments said...

Not seen anything like that before, but the behavior of some birds never ceases to amaze me.

I caught on video once, a Crow burying an apple core, and when he turned his back, another came over and stole it.

good natured said...

once saw two crows dive-bombing a herring gull for no reason. They may look relatively dull but their very territorial and very interesting birds

Jason K said...

I saw you mention this during you talk at the Birdfair Dave. It's not a behaviour I have ever witnessed before...its certainly a perculiar one.

Really enjoyed your talk by the way. I used to bird in manly uirban areas as I grew up just outside of Birmingham in the Black Country where I lived until about 10 years ago when I moved to Worcestershire. One of my highlights came in spring a few years back when I was working in security/enforcement for local government. I turned up early morning for work at dawn, parked my car on an empty town centre carpark in Dudley (an built up town that is built on a fairly high hill) only to notice that perched on a scrubby bush was a ♂ Ring Ouzel. On seeing me the bird then flew toward the adjacent high point of Netherton Hill which is a more suitable scrubby environment where they are recorded occasionally on passage....

Like you say you never know what you may see even in the most unlikely of areas

Findlay Wilde said...

That is very odd behaviour, birds follow my leader. From Findlay

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