“Caw, caw, caw.” I haven’t heard that sound for a while.
“Oh look, Lucy,” I said to my adorable little puppy, my 10-pound Shiba-Chi (Shiba Inu Chihuahua) rescue, who is actually about 11 years old but will always be a puppy to me.
“It’s a crow. We haven’t seen many of those lately.”
Well, Lucy wasn’t a bit interested. After all, it wasn’t a bunny or one of those many cute little lizards we have around here, or her very favorite, squirrels. Darn those squirrels. If you have a dog, you know exactly what I mean.
Poor crows. They’re kind of ugly, at least in my eyes. Maybe that’s because I was fortunate enough to live in the suburbs of Canberra, Australia, in the 1980s, and there were absolutely beautiful birds flying free like our crows.
There were galahs (rose-breasted and gray cockatoos), lorikeets, parrots and very colorful wrens. It was kind of like living in an aviary. I loved my walks because of these beautiful birds.
One day, when I was out walking, I felt something hit my head. Teenagers, I thought. Probably throwing their trash (wadded up paper or a paper cup or such) from a passing car at the poor, unsuspecting and completely oblivious pedestrian. Yikes, it happened again. Hey! There can’t be two cars with rogue teenagers in them!
It was then that I looked up and noticed a sign that cautioned all to “Beware of magpies” or something like that. And then I noticed a black and white bird zeroing in on my head, like a kamikaze pilot.
But unlike kamikaze pilots, those magpies were not suicidal. They were anything but, because they were about to have babies. They had a lot to look forward to in life. This was their nesting time, and they didn’t want us big old humans anywhere near them.
So anyhoo, there I was running down the street trying to get into parked cars with magpies in pursuit. I was quite unsuccessful because the cars were all locked.
What the heck! Haven’t all those Aussies been telling me how safe it was…
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