So I discovered this week that Bo loves cherries. It's cherry season, and they're growing on trees throughout the neighborhood. Bo doesn't have a cherry tree on his turf, but there happened to be one on the ground, which he investigated, and then promptly tore to pieces and gobbled up.
So of course I had to go and pick some more for him.
Here he is, practically running over to get another cherry.
And then taking off with it...
..to devour in a tree. He does that sometimes, if he gets something he really values. Even though I'm the one who gave it to him, I think he runs off with the food because it's so good he's concerned I might try and eat it myself.
Lorena enjoyed the cherries, too.
Bo's little brother, Junior, didn't care about cherries at all, but he has a cherry tree on his turf, so maybe it wasn't a novelty to him.
There's a cherry tree just outside of Bo's territory, but it's guarded by these guys. They're all puffy after arguing with Bo and Lorena about property lines.
I tried to bring Bo more cherries later in the week, but he snubbed them. He insisted he didn't like them anymore. Maybe they gave him gas. He only wanted kibble and corn chips. Everyone wanted corn chips!
That's Lorena in the beginning of the video, and then Bo trying to chase everyone off. Lorena actually called out something when Bo went after the scrub jay that made him stop his pursuit. This is interesting to me, because in much of the interactions I see between Bo and Lorena, Bo is in charge. Especially with food, and especially with food I give them. Bo always has to eat first, and even if he is just caching the food (hiding it to eat later), he doesn't want Lorena to eat what's left. She has to sneak in and take little bites. Sometimes Bo chases her off when she does. If I put food down in separate piles, Bo will go to the pile that is farther from me, because he knows Lorena isn't confident enough to come close to me. It makes me mad, but she and I have worked out a system to where I ply Bo with more food than he can handle, he flies off to cache it, and I give Lorena whatever she wants.The other day I brought scrambled eggs, and Lorena was so excited she was drooling like a dog, and even forgot that she was timid around me. I wish I'd gotten a picture. It was so cute.
Bo knows about our sneaky system, so sometimes he caches food close by so he can stay in charge. Here's a video of him trying to collect more kibbles but having to keep running back to stop Lorena from invading his cache. (Bo in the foreground.)
Baby is doing really well! I've seen them flying around in big arcs overhead like a real grownup crow. I didn't take many pictures this week. Most of the time they were just flying by or hidden away in the trees, like this.
But I did get a super cute video of baby being fed by Bo on a rooftop, and then taking off in response to something Lorena said. If you've never heard the sound of a baby crow being fed, you should definitely watch at least the first few seconds of this with the volume up. It's pretty ridiculous.
There was quite a bit of hawk and eagle action over the neighborhood this week, and I captured some pictures of a very bold crow chasing a red tailed hawk.
Hawks and eagles will eat fledgling crows, so it's important that the crows make sure the raptors never have a chance. I'm fairly certain this wasn't Bo, but I was worried for the crow nonetheless.
(The crow is above the hawk, looking down, and the hawk is looking up at the crow. Sometimes dimensions don't come across very well in photos with a sky backdrop.)
I didn't introduce any new objects for Bo to fiddle with this week, but he found something on his own. It appeared to be a strip of fur and skin from something dead, probably a squirrel. It may have held some nutritional value, but it looked to me like he was just having fun picking at it. I like how he saved it for later.
I'm still hemming and hawing about a name for baby. I was thinking Odin, the Norse god sometimes referred to as a raven god, but I feel like that might be cliché. I've just been calling them "baby," but that's every fledgling crow's name within a five-mile radius right now. I had a fantastic name pop into my head today, but of course I can't remember it now. Hopefully it comes back to me.
Any suggestions? Crows aren't concerned about gender-specific names. A symbolic word in another language could be cool, too.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this post! If you’d like to learn more about my friendship with Bo, please read my blog An Unexpected Friendship. I blog about Bo every week, and post tons of my photos of crows and other birds (and sometimes other subjects) on a regular basis. If you like this kind of stuff, follow me! And join Feathered Friends!
Thanks for reading!
All photos and videos are mine unless otherwise stated, taken with my Nikon D7500 or iPhone and edited with Apple Photo Editor and Adobe Lightroom.
Lorena and Bo
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