Birdology: Adventures with a Pack of Hens, a Peck of Pigeons, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosaur

by Sy Montgomery

Cities offer many amenities.

Human refuse features a smorgasbord of pleasure for a winged scavenger with an eclectic palate.

Cities tend to be warmer

bright lights

to spy a night-flying predator like their worst enemy, the great horned owl.

“They ravage songbird nests. They get into the duck eggs. They tear off the farmers’ silage wraps. They’re overwhelming everything!”

feed on the corpses

Because of this, crows and their relatives have been associated in much of European mythology with cruelty, death, and disease.

In China, it was widely believed that storks were the vehicle for the dead (interestingly, this tradition is reversed in the European tradition, showing storks bringing human babies into the world from the sky).