Covid Corvid
Written in Paris during the spring lockdown on 9th of May 2020
Caution: some photos are graphic and some people may find them upsetting
Despite being in a ground floor apartment looking into a courtyard, one of the small joys of the lockdown has been watching the birds jump about around a few small shrubs and trees outside. We’ve seen sparrows, great tits, blue tits, lots of pigeons, far too much pigeon copulation and earlier this week, the blue flash of our first jay.
We’ve mainly had small flocks of sparrows bobbing around the bushes. Our apartment windows act kind of like an aquarium — we can see everything going on as they jump around the branches of a fig tree as well as when they hide in the undergrowth below it.
We’d seen the birds gathering branches for their nests and over the last few days the tell tale squeeks of babies chirping. Then, yesterday, we finally saw them! This little baby is probably about 10 days old — this was almost certainly the day it fledged from the nest.
The chicks would chirrup to reply to their parent’s tweets as the parents busied themselves, darting around to collect aphids and other insects for them to eat. The chicks kept themselves pretty well hidden under the cover of the thicker bushes though.
Every so often the father (the mother is probably back in the nest getting it ready for another clutch of babies already!) would fly down into the bushes, finding their offspring by the noisy tweets being screamed out for food.
The sound of tweeting continued all morning but a sudden crescendo made us dash to the window to see what all the commotion was about. We saw our jay was back in the courtyard — quite a surprise considering how shy they are. They are more at home in a woodland environment but are increasingly found in cities now that their favoured oak habitats are disappearing. The jay slowly explored the garden — starting on the top of the wall before jumping down into the undergrowth as it continued bouncing around.
The other birds seemed anxious though. The tweets went from frantic to silent as though they knew trouble was about. The three baby sparrows stayed motionless as the parents screamed from the courtyard walls.
Suddenly a series of frantic high pitched tweets erupted from one of the bushes. The jay emerged with one of the sparrows in its mouth as it pulled the bird out of the undergrowth with the chick’s wings flapping frantically. The whole scene unfolded unexpectedly in front of us as the jay quickly disabled the young bird and left it motionless in a neighbour’s flower pot.
Within another 10 minutes, the jay had repeated its manoeuvres to catch and kill three sparrow chicks in total. It was sad to see — especially after having grown so attached to the sparrows over the last 50 days of lockdown as they slowly stocked up their nests. But the jay’s behaviour after this was morbidly fascinating to watch. Before it carried one of the chicks back to its nest for its own waiting nestlings, it carried the other two up onto a high wall where cats would struggle to find it.
Seeing the chick lie there, my photo documentary instinct kicked in and I started a stake out — I knew the photo that would eventually appear so I prepped my lens and camera settings to be ready for it.I spent 30 minutes waiting for another flash of blue to appear. Eventually, it dropped back into the courtyard…
The bird’s first job was to pick up one of the chicks from the wall (a different one to the earlier photo) and, well, sadly it ripped it to shreds. It wasn’t eating it — but instead proceeded to hide the body bits in strategic places in the garden…
…the photo above was taken as it double checked the leg it had hidden in the ivy wasn’t visible. Hiding food away is very typical jay behaviour — but usually you would spot them hiding acorns in the autumn. A single Eurasian jay can hide up to 1000 acorns in a single autumn and are vital for the spread of Oak trees in Europe. They will however eat smaller birds and mammals if the opportunity arises.
Once it was sure it had hidden away all the body parts of the second chick, it went on to retrieve the third from the wall. It was clearly struggling to carry its weight as it made its way up the walls of the courtyard step by step. It would eventually sail over the roof of the apartment building to its own nearby nest.
We didn’t see the jay for the rest of the afternoon — but rather squeemishly, we knew that there were body bits stuffed into lots of places in the garden outside. While the tweeting of birds had given us so much excitement over the last few weeks, we would now greet each flurry of squeeks with apprehension.
But as the evening set in, the jay arrived back for the third and final chick.
It meticulously sought out each of the body parts it had cached. Each time, bringing it back to a favourite perch; using its talons to hold it in place and its sharp beak to rip into the flesh. This third chick would be its own dinner — with its young already fed by the first two.
Throughout the lockdown, the world has been limited to the walls of my apartment and the high walls of the courtyard outside. Very little of the outside world has made an appearance here other than the noises of our neighbours rebounding off the walls. The birds that have made the courtyard home have been one of the nicest companions to have as they continued living their lives while we watched on from the window. While it really hit me and my girlfriend to see the sparrows being snatched out of the branches on their first day in the great outdoors, seeing a predator vs prey battle play out was a nice reminder of all the wildlife that thrives so immediately close to home. The end of the lockdown can’t come soon enough, but we won’t have to travel far to enjoy the nature surrounding us!
