Eating crow is for the birds

St David’s Day, March 1st – an important day for the Welsh when they celebrate the life of their patron saint – this year fell on the first Sunday of the month. But the first Sunday in March is always Crow Sunday, an important day for crows in Scotland. The day, traditionally, when they start to build their nests.

Crows get a bad press which is not altogether justified. Crows, or more properly carrion crows, carry out a useful function.

Some of their habits might appear cruel but in reality they are doing what crows do naturally. Their habit, for instance, of pecking out the eyes and tongues of newborn lambs and other weak and defenceless animals. As a youngster I was told they don’t have strong talons like hawks to hold their prey, so they blind it to stop its escape, and give them time to despatch it. The old story of the survival of the fittest.

Like all members of the crow family they are highly intelligent and inquisitive, and in springtime they can devastate ground nesting birds’ eggs. There are stories of gamekeepers marking grouse nest sites with stakes to help find them later and, returning after several days, finding the crows reasoned what the stakes were for and cleaned out all the eggs.

The birds’ ill-starred reputation is part of the English language. No girl wants crow’s feet round her eyes. Old crow – a sneering term of derision. There’s an obvious association with crow’s nest, the lookout platform at the masthead of a ship, but why crowbar?

Everyone knows the nursery rhyme Sing a song of sixpence / A pocketful of rye / Four and twenty blackbirds / Baked in a pie…

It’s meant to date from the early 18th Century and to be drawn from social history, folklore and allegorical symbolism. I’m not sure what allegorical symbolism means but my Loanhead aunties had a simpler explanation.

They told me the black birds in the rhyme were not blackbirds – cousins to song thrushes – but black birds or young rooks. Hence their pie role.

Young crows, on the other hand, never seem to have been part of the Scotsman’s plain fare. Their carrion diet taints their flesh making the meat unpalatable. A young rook’s diet is more organic, comprising mainly grain, seeds, worms and insects, so the flesh makes them a basis for rook pie.

I wondered just how traditional a dish rook pie is but could find no mention in Marion Lochhead’s The Scots Household In The Eighteenth Century. Nothing either in F Marion McNeill’s The Scots Kitchen (1929), written to “preserve the recipes of our old national dishes, many of which... are in danger of falling into underserved oblivion”.

Take One Glen, a compilation by Pat Thomson of recipes from Glenesk, my favourite Angus glen, had no answer. I drew a blank in Mrs Arthur Webb’s Farmhouse Cookery, but did find a recipe for rather sinful Angus Toffee.

My picture this week is of one of the last neighbourhood woodpeckers still drumming away on the topmost branch of an elderly beech tree to draw a mate.

I was lucky to get it. I’ve spent three weeks trying just to catch sight of one of the birds. They are notoriously wary and will sneak to the other side of a branch to avoid being spotted. But with the sun on his brilliant plumage, he’s sure to attract a lonely female.

Not so lucky, perhaps, is a single partridge, one of our native grey species, which Inka and I have disturbed several times walking the margins of the fields near home. Perhaps he – or maybe she – is the only survivor of its covey. Because of habitat loss grey partridge are under threat of becoming an endangered species. So I hope this one survives and pairs up to nest this spring.

Dumpy little birds, brown and chestnut plumage on their flanks, soft grey underparts and a distinctive dark horseshoe of feathers on the breast, grey partridge are my favourite farmland bird.

My memories are of being out with my father in the autumn dusk, hearing their creaky calls, like a piece of rusty fencing wire pulled through a rusty staple as they settled down to roost for the night.

“Their creaky calls, like a piece of rusty fencing wire pulled through a rusty staple

I caught an image of one of the last woodpeckers in our neighbourhood, still tapping away in the hope of attracting a mate.