This is a wonderful article about people who are fighting for the rights of crows. Crows, I say, are a lot like us, the human race, in many ways. They share many characteristics and values in life. A summary of this story from a few years ago, but farmers and older generations still see this wonderful bird as a threat, and they really need to see them as a helpful creature just trying to live among us. People accuse crows of doing things that other mammals started but they are only there to finish what someone else started, like when a raccoon tips over garbage to get the lid off. The crows would be there first thing in the morning, since the raccoon is sleeping during the day. This is an opportunity for them to find food, which may be why they are just hanging out. As a bird, they are unable to tip the garbage can, but I’ve always heard stories about the crow who got into the trash can.

A murder of crows: Chris Packham and the countryside war over bird killings

• To a surprising extent, to know the crow is to know ourselves,” says John Marzluff in the preface to In the Company of Crows and Ravens.
• After all, “crows and people share similar traits and social strategies”.
• Crows and their relatives have captured human imaginations since the paleolithic period, when they were depicted in cave paintings.
• They are the doomed messenger in the story of Noah’s ark; the vain cheese-squanderers in the fable of Aesop; and the dark redeemer in Ted Hughes’s Crow, “Flying the black flag of himself”.
• Recently, though, crows have been cast in a new role: as feral death squadrons, terrorizing rural Britain like a Hitchcockian nightmare come to life. “
• The savage cruelty of a law that lets crows torture and kill lambs,” screamed one headline last month, accompanied by gruesome pictures of livestock maimed and blinded by carrion crows and ravens. “
• The reason for all the anti-crow propaganda was the abrupt decision by Natural England (the public body that advises the government on environmental affairs) to revoke the general license to shoot 16 species of birds, including corvidae such as crows, rooks, jackdaws, magpies and jays, as well as wood pigeons, herring gulls and black-backed gulls.
• As of midnight on 24 April, anyone who wanted to shoot these birds was required to fill in a form on the Natural England website – which promptly crashed.
• The ruling was inspired by a campaign by Wild Justice, which Avery co-founded with the conservationist and BBC presenter Chris Packham – who awoke the next morning to find the gate of his home in Hampshire glued shut and crow carcasses dangling beside it. (
• He has also received death threats and faced calls to be sacked.
• Gamekeepers point to evidence that crows threaten rare curlews as well as gamebirds – and must, regrettably, be kept under control. “
• Since tempers have frayed, Michael Gove, the environment secretary, has taken control of the issue – and when you are relying on Gove to be Mr Reasonable, something has gone seriously awry.
• Critics feel Packham has alienated many would-be allies and undermined the incremental progress they have made in winning over landowners.
• He has been a hate figure for the Countryside Alliance since he called people involved in hunting and shooting “the nasty brigade”.
• Since we spoke, he has set up Wild Justice.
• “Avery says he and Packham “fell upon” Wild Justice’s first campaign accidentally.
• Avery also cautions against the idea that farmers are the sole custodians of countryside knowledge. “
• “He recognizes that farmers need to protect their crops and livestock. “
• People have been seeing magpies, crows, jackdaws etc as fair game – and that’s not what the law says.
• We just pointed this out to Natural England.
• “If you were to draw up a list of things that farmers do not like, it might include: unplanned sudden changes of policy; filling in forms; bureaucrats; “keyboard warriors”; and, of course, crows – which makes Natural England’s decision a perfect storm. “
• It’s not all Animals of Farthing Wood out here,” says Guy Smith of the National Farmers’ Union.
• He believes farmers should be trusted to manage their own land – and hopes Gove will eventually come round to that view.
• “We know crows are predatory and attack small nesting birds and vulnerable livestock.
• There isn’t a farmer I know who doesn’t struggle with pigeons and crows.
• And these species have done remarkably well in the past 40 years – just look at the graphs.
• Crows are clever, too. “
• Philip Kemp, a smallholder in Suffolk, sees them as a “constant threat … just in the past 12 months I’ve had two chickens eaten, leaving a skeletal carcass, on successive days.
• That said, he has never felt the urge to shoot them.
• But Smith is not right to say that every farmer is anti-corvid. “
• We have a local rook population that comes and rakes over the cow muck to get at the grubs underneath,” says a Pembrokeshire dairy farmer, who declined to be named for fear of reprisals. “
• And when a calf is born in the field, the foxes will nip around picking up pieces of afterbirth.
• I also speak to the manager of an estate in Lancashire who confesses to pro-crow sympathies: “Gorgeous scavengers, much like ourselves.”
• The reality is that any farmed environment is out of balance and the human has to play the role of predator in suppressing numbers.
• The public does need to stop obsessing about how animals die and start focusing more on how they live.”
• There are hi-tech solutions to crows (drones and lasers) as well as relatively lo-tech ones (gas-bangers and scarecrows).
• Then they are more scared of the bangs.
• You have to mix it up; simple as.”
• He stresses that stringing up dead crow carcasses as a deterrent is a “bit of countryside lore” that has little evidence behind it.
• Yet, despite the heat of the argument, I find much less disagreement between farmers and the conservationists than you might imagine – it is certainly not a simple case of city meddlers versus farmers.
• Even Wild Justice agrees that Natural England and Defra have handled the case badly.
• While the farmers I speak to lament bureaucracy, many concede that some form of licensing is appropriate. “
• Perhaps there should be a test to ensure shooters can tell a rook from a blackbird before they go blasting away at anything that moves,” suggests one.
• Any intervention humans make is liable to have unintended consequences – and crow and human populations are intimately linked.
• But there is one human activity that has boomed in recent years and has been linked to the increase in crows: game shooting. “
• Pheasant and partridge shooting puts a lot of unnecessary grain on the land, which drives up the corvine and rodent population and also spreads disease,” says the Lancashire estate manager. “
• As with everything ‘luxury’ in the past 10 years, shooting has rapidly expanded, and it’s having a large impact.”
• There is evidence that game management benefits the natural environment in some ways.
• Driven grouse shooting is a French import, while pheasant shooting occurs on an industrial scale. “
• There has been a tenfold increase in the number of released pheasants in the UK over the past 40 years – and it’s a non-native species,” says Avery. “
• There’s nothing traditional about releasing 43m pheasants into the British countryside each year and using them for target practice.”
• Those 43m pheasants represent, in terms of biomass, the most abundant “wild” species in Britain.
• Many farmers have started rearing pheasants, as it is more profitable than food production.
• Crows benefit further from the grain laid down for the pheasants and the virtual elimination of apex predators.
• In 2016, Natural England controversially issued licences to gamekeepers to shoot buzzards – a protected species – in order to “prevent serious damage” to young pheasants.
• Gamekeepers have been accused of killing and disrupting the nests of birds of prey that may otherwise make life harder for the crows.
• Goshawks, for example, were virtually eliminated from Britain in the 19th century after persecution by gamekeepers.
• While fox hunting has always been the more emotive issue, Lee Moon of the Hunt Saboteurs Association is increasingly focused on bird shooting. “
• It’s wealthy people going out to shoot large numbers of birds purely for their own gratification.
• It has nothing to do with the food chain.
• It has nothing to do with conservation.
• The grouse industry, for example, argues that heather moors would turn into wasteland without it. “
• Gamekeepers provide conservation services for a number of threatened birds including curlew, golden plover, lapwing, merlin and black grouse for free,” says Anderson of the Moorland Association. “
• I’m not a country dweller, but I think I have a right to comment on this, just as I have a right to comment on big-game shooting in Africa.
• If you visit a grouse moor, it’s a wasteland except for grouse.
• This is nothing to do with being guardians of the countryside.”
• As for the crows – gorgeous scavengers that they are – perhaps we shouldn’t judge them so harshly.
• Crows have been shown to mourn their dead, to punish selfishness in their peers, to play and to hold grudges.
• Ted Hughes again: “Crow realized God loved him / Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.”
• https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/14/a-of-crows-chris-packham-and-the-countryside-war-over-bird-killings