Nature's Carnage #3

The somewhat familiar smell of death was wafting around the back fence when I went to dispose of some scraps in the compost bin, and I knew for a fact it wasn’t the compost bin. A couple of wallabies have chosen to use my backyard as their final resting place over the years, not nice to dispose of, but nothing in evidence of that sort on this occasion. Wandered back and forth, poking around the bushes, until eventually I found the source of the aroma.

 I did a double take, for here was a double murder surely, certainly not a double suicide. I’d never seen anything quite so bizarre when it comes to birds meeting their fate. Two blackbirds, hanging by their necks in the forks of a branch, was just too weird. Surely they weren’t practicing dive-bombing or flying at such a great rate of knots that they didn’t notice where they were going and just happened to both get themselves caught by the throat at exactly the same moment. Don’t think so.

Shared this dilemma with a few friends, and one noted he’d heard of crows doing something similar, displaying their deceased enemies to mark their territory and ward off any unsuspecting foreigners who deigned to encroach on their space. I’ve never looked at a crow the same way since watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds in my early teens, freaked me out, so nothing would surprise me as far as crows are concerned. Maybe that’s how the term a Murder of Crows originated.

In mysterious

circumstances, two blackbirds

blatantly dispatched