Why robins are nothing to crow about!

WHO would be a crow? Britons seem to be taking out their frustration over Brexit on our little feathered friends.

No one used to worry about crows. Most of us could take them or leave them.

of course, from time to time they came in for a bout of bad publicity. Alfred hitchcock demonised them, along with their pals, the seagulls, when he made his film The Birds.

one of my favourite bird books, Birds Britannica, can barely find a good word to say for them. ‘They remain the most unloved of British species’ its authors observe, dolefully adding that ‘the crow is the classic symbol of evil and portent of misfortune’.

Crows are, let’s face it, remarkably plain birds, ill-favoured by nature, blessed with neither charm nor good looks. on top of these misfortunes, they clearly lack the PR resources of their sweeter, smarter rivals. The robin redbreast, the budgie and the little jenny wren have somehow managed to control their public images, starting with the cutesy re- branding of their original names.

They have also courted public opinion by sweeping their vices under the carpet while parading their virtues. The robin, for instance, was recently voted Britain’s favourite bird, winning three times the number of votes cast for its closest rival.

Yet, in its private life it is not as nice as it looks. Beneath its alltoo-public virtue- signalling, the robin can be spiteful, even murderous. It is openly aggressive towards birds it considers rivals, and has been known to peck them to death.

Needless to say, the crow didn’t even make the longlist. But worse was to follow. Just imagine the crow as it turned to page 5 of Monday’s Daily Mail and came across a photograph of itself taken from a particularly bad angle (mouth wide open, knees bent), next to a photograph of a dead lamb.

Like Strictly Come Dancing loverat Kevin Clifton and fat- cat clothing magnate Sir Philip Green, the poor crow is urgently in need of a re-brand. But what can he do about it?

Britain is full of PR companies who would be only too delighted to take the crow on as a client, and then arrange to have him photographed doing charitable work, or sharing a joke with David Attenborough. he might even be ‘secretly’ filmed exchanging views on the weather with a couple of cheery lambs.

My own advice would be to sign up for a season of The Great British Bake-off, tying it in with a guest spot on The one Show. Both these programmes excel at bringing out the best in their guests, while turning a blind eye to any major character faults, such as a weakness for feasting on songbird chicks.

The country’s leading crow expert, Mark Cocker, says that our grudge against the crow goes back centuries. ‘In Tudor Britain there were laws ... to make it obligatory to persecute crows. Failure to kill them was punishable by fines.’

Their corvid cousins, ravens, have also found their name tarred by prejudice. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, the black cars driven by the dreaded secret police were known as Voronok, or ‘fast ravens’.

But there is hope for the crow yet. Not all that long ago, the owl was regarded as a harbinger of ill-fortune, perhaps because of that creepy way it has of twisting its head 270 degrees. But now it is seen as a fount of wisdom and serenity, though, to be fair, the mouse community has yet to be convinced.

In yet another symptom of our current Brexity anxiety, an organisation called The Mammal Society is trying to create yet another division in the animal kingdom by coming up with a report which claims that ‘pet cats kill 27 million birds a year’.

Mr Tony Duckett, the Conservation officer for the Royal Parks in London, is arguing that, from now on, cats should be locked indoors, under permanent house arrest.

‘These so-called pets shouldn’t be allowed to roam freely, s******* in other people’s gardens, killing birds or just putting them off,’ he says. Someone got out of bed the wrong side! And quite what Mr Duckett means by ‘just putting them off’ is anyone’s guess? What is he accusing them of? Pulling faces? Making rude noises? Calling them names?

In summary: this week, we have learnt that cats kill birds and birds kill lambs. No doubt next week we will be told that lambs kill cats, and the circle will be complete. My only hope is that no one ever discovers that humans often eat lambs for Sunday lunch, or there’ll be no end of a fuss.