Tuesday 17 February 2009

CENSORED!

Mystery Bird
Being mobbed by Carrion Crows
ditto
Sorry to be so circumspect with this post, but I've already been censored on this issue, and I don't really want it to happen again. The previous version of this message was posted within minutes of the events it described, but must have been so explicit it disappeared down a black hole in space!!! What follows, is a more longwinded version which hopefully will be so boring you won't get to the bottom of the paragraph, to find out what I'm attempting to explain!
Yesterday morning at 9.30 I was washing my hands at the kitchen sink & staring out the window, as you do, when I noticed the sky outside was swirling with birds which tend to make their homes on large and often unoccupied buildings. In this case it was over a large penitential institution in a fairly large city, which until fairly recently has always had a deeply disappointing football team. Please don't try & work out what these are, as that may help you to identify the mystery bird, and even worse, where I saw it. This nuisance bird played about in the sky for a short time with these town birds, but didn't seriously harm any. It then settled on a large yellow structure, which tend to be more common in towns and cities with large waterways. It stayed on there for at least 15 mins, and through a telescope you could see the glint in its eyes as its head moved from side-to-side. A pair of crows (which in this particular case nest in a wooded place where dead people are buried) started moving closer until they eventually started mobbing this now static bird. The said bird (which often has rather fraught relations with other birds) then took flight & after a bit of mid-air skirmishing it decided to take off at a high rate of knots (but I won't say it was quick, as that would be too obvious a clue) along a major waterway in a direction which would have taken in to the coast if it continued flying at that same speed & direction for another 30 mins. That's the end of War and Peace, it's not my fault if you can figure out what the bird was & where it was, as you must be Einstein to work your way through all that obfuscation. Luckily, the pics are also so poor, they will be no help to you either. Although I enjoyed watching this bird, I hope it never reappears, as I don't wish to inflict such a verbose text on you again, or go to the effort of writing it!

4 comments:

James said...

Who is giving you grief about this? Its not like your revealing major revelations like Peregrines occur in cities with feral pigeon populations as they make easy food. Or East Yorkshire is chokka with Peregrines in winter due to high levels of potential prey and lots of habitat. Because saying things like that would be silly. And wrong. Obviously.

Jan S said...

Let me see .... ah yes, got it! Mum's the word!!

Anonymous said...

May be I am stating the obvious, but a crane is a rare bird in Yorkshire so the details should ne surpressed. A yellow crane is even rarer.

Michael Flowers said...

Nice one, Marcus!