My housemate Hafize has been taking care of a young crow for the past few weeks. And the relationship is becoming so hilarious that I want to make a note of it. Bıdık, as the crow is named (means little one in Turkish), was found between two parked cars in the dead of night in a neighborhood called Çağlayan where Hafize had gone to visit her sister. Baby crows are actually quite big, you know they are babies from their wings which are still unformed and their beaks which are thin and relatively soft. He was kept inside for the first few days, but then we realized that he would be OK outdoors provided he was near an open window in case he needed to flee inside. He has grown very quickly, can now fly (after a fashion – he still cannot gracefully glide the way adult crows do, quite a bit of excessive wing flapping there), he gets fed raw chicken, cheese and meat as special treats but his main food is cat kibbles which he seems to thoroughly enjoy.
And he is an absolute delight to have around. Very funny, very mischievous, extremely inquisitive. I had always heard that crows are highly intelligent, but I had no idea they were this intelligent. Far more intelligent than the cats and the dog, as far as I can tell. And a very pronounced personality. Scurrilous, deceitful, playful, obstinate.
I hope he learns to eventually fend for himself, not live his life as a pampered house-crow (if there is such a thing). He has been flying further and further and there are plenty of crows around here. So, my big hope is that he will somehow hook up with them. But meanwhile he is with us. Hafize and the neighbors have been taking a lot of videos of him, and I have started to collect them on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvbK8Vus5VDV8rrPcLqReow/videos There’s some other stuff there as well, of course, but the bulk of it is crow and cat stuff. And I will go ahead and embed one of the funniest ones here:
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