Crows' nests

Today I went out for a little while, and stopped at a little park near our house. It is a beautiful spring day, and I sat under this tree.


That is my bicycle.

I sat on the bench and observed, across the park, a crow's nest, with a crow in it.


I sat there and tried to imagine one of those hooligans being a mother. It wasn't easy. But actually I didn't need to imagine it. I could see a crow tail. The crow was definitely there, being motherly.


After a while I caught a glimpse of movement above me, and looked up.


How come I'd never noticed thrushes around here before, and suddenly this year I've seen two? Maybe it was the same one. Maybe it followed me from the paddy field.

(Correction: It is not a thrush. It is a bulbul.)

As I tried to focus on the thrush (and about twenty clicks later finally succeeded) I noticed a big blob in the tree, much higher up. It had to be another crow's nest, but something about it looked ... odd.


I zoomed in, and clicked. Then I checked out the picture I'd taken, and zoomed it some more. I saw a much blurrier version of this:


(I took another thirty or so photos, and the one above is the only one that was in focus. I also ended up with a crick in my neck.)

I tried to find other angles to take pictures from, but the only place the nest was visible from was underneath, more or less where I was sitting on the bench beside the bicycle in the first picture.

While I was showing The Man the pictures just now, he commented that the two crow's nests are entirely different in style. We came to the conclusion that the log cabin-style nest belongs to a hippie back-to-nature crow who eats only organically grown rubbish. The coat hanger nest, on the other hand, belongs to an avant-garde, modernist crow, who collects rubbish and calls it 'found art,' and who believes that art shouldn't be comfortable.