Shopping Mall Birds

I bought a bacon and egg burrito for breakfast this morning, I was in town for water aerobics. Then I parked in the shade in the small shopping mall and ate it. I don't eat carbs, so I was busy picking the flour tortilla away when I noticed a nice big crow eating something in the grass. It was being dive bombed by blackbirds. At first I thought it might be munching on a baby blackbird, but it wasn't. It was sucking the insides out of an egg.

The egg was too big to belong to the blackbirds. It was a pigeon egg*. A very fresh one; so I just considered it birth control, not murder. The crow finished the egg, ate the shell, then perched on an exit sign for a nearby fast food place. The sign said, "Thank You!" I couldn't get my iPhone out fast enough to get a picture.

There were lots of blackbirds out with their squawking fledglings and the crow was one of a pair of parents that had 3 juveniles. This shopping mall has several grassy areas with nice trees. There must be automatic sprinklers because there were several nice puddles for the birds. The parents were trying to teach their young to forage for food. It wasn't working very well.

The blackbird babies could fly. But they only had eyes for their parents. I tore up the burrito and put it on the lawn. The parents came over and pecked at it, the babies standing behind them, shaking their wings and screeching loudly. Mama bird picked up a piece of burrito and dropped it. She did this several times. None of the babies would come forward and take it. She finally shrugged her wings (really, I could see it) and poked the piece in one baby's big mouth.

If that had been a human child we would all have chided the mother for giving in. We'd say, "How do you expect that lazy kid to learn anything if you're always placating him?" Some parents do anything for some peace and quiet, don't they? Maybe that's not wrong, if the birds do it, it must be the natural thing to do. I never had to make that decision, Bob was an easy kid, he never screeched. (He would say, "You wouldn't screech either, if she was YOUR mother.")

The young crows weren't learning their lessons any better than the blackbird babies were. They were  hopping about aimlessly, looking at the sky for mom or pop to show up with the chow. An adult crow would have noticed immediately that the blackbirds were flocking on the ground nearby, and would have surmised that food was involved. If there had been a seagull within 5 miles, it would have been there in an instant; they have a psychic bond with all food in the universe. (We don't have seagulls here in the summer, they come in the fall when the salmon are running and they stay through the winter.)

Except for the dorky redtail that got slapped around by its mama this week, I haven't seen our country birds behaving like the suburban birds were. The hummers just show up as a family and sit around on the feeder, sucking up syrup. The jays can be annoying for their parents, but there are so many mulberries on the ground even the laziest jay baby can easily feed itself (and then go spread that purple poop everywhere). I have heard the robins, but haven't seen any fledglings. Maybe I just haven't been paying attention. I need to do that.

*How did I know it was a pigeon egg? Because I see a lot of them, and because I've seen pigeons on top of the fast food place.