On Parenthood, First Flights and The Persistent Effects Of Gravity

Crowmum disappeared again in early April. This time, I was ready for it.

Last year her sudden absence had prompted several days of Where's Crowmum? Is she all right? Has something happened to her? before I eventually worked out that, no, nothing had happened to her. She was sitting in a tree making another crow. This year she vanished for two days and I thought: Eggs.

Crowdad, meanwhile, was behaving like a man whose wife had sent him out for groceries. He stayed close to home, appearing on the roof whenever I left the building and staring meaningfully down at me.

Food?

Yes, Crowdad. I know.

He was also taking his role as Head of Security extremely seriously. One morning he took exception to a flock of about twenty gulls. I don't know what they'd done. Possibly nothing. But they had crossed an invisible boundary known only to Crowdad, and he sounded the alarm. Within seconds there were ten crows in the air. They mobbed the gulls en masse, drove the entire lot off towards the Gannel and then, job done, dispersed back to wherever they’d come from. Crowdad returned to his lookout position.

I was impressed.

The gulls were presumably trying to contact the complaints department.

For the next couple of weeks, Crowmum was almost completely absent. Crowdad was torn between provisioning the food and protecting the nest. Getting food meant leaving his high vantage point and taking his eyes off the skies, so it was always done hastily and with apparent high anxiety. It helped that he knew a constant supply of food was available nearby from a trusted source.

When the trusted source changed something, Crowdad nearly had a meltdown.

I have fine thin hair. Getting it highlighted helps to fluff up the surface and make it look fuller. Unfortunately 2026 was another year of ever increasing prices on…pretty much everything. Babylights, toner and a trim at £150 every two months was becoming harder to justify. So I decided to do it myself. A quick 10 minute bleach bath, a semi permanent colour to tone it, and an excellent Brad Mondo tutorial on how to cut your hair using a strategically placed ponytail. What can go wrong?

The first mistake was buying a box containing powder sachets and something called 40 volume. The second mistake was thinking “I’ll just give it a couple more minutes”.

Bright ginger. Shit. Worse…bright ginger straw. Double shit! The light ash brown colour I’d bought as a toner could not compete. I blow-dried my hair and, as usual, applied plumping powder to give it some volume. I shouldn’t have. I was now forced to leave the building looking like a carrot-topped Wurzel Gummidge.

Crowdad initially flew down eagerly. But as he approached…let’s just say his body language changed. He aborted the landing last minute in favour of a lamppost, from where he craned his neck, tilted his head this way and that, and fidgeted so much he nearly lost his grip. He gave a couple of loud caws.

“Opinion noted. Not another word.”

I’m happy to report that I resolved the hair disaster with a darker brown colour and a lot of conditioner. My hair is out of critical care but treatment is ongoing. And no, I can’t face going back to my hairdresser and explaining…that (waves hands in general direction of head).

Eventually Crowmum reappeared. Repeatedly. Suddenly she was at virtually every feeding again, stuffing her face alongside Crowdad as though she'd been released from prison. At first this confused me. If she was nesting, why wasn't Crowdad taking food back to her? Then I realised neither of them appeared to be taking much food anywhere. They ate it. Three feeds could disappear gradually over the course of the day. No frantic loading of beaks. No obvious shuttle service to the tree.

Maybe I'd got the timing wrong. Maybe there weren't chicks yet. Maybe Crowmum had just spent two weeks sitting on some eggs and had finally reached the entirely reasonable conclusion that Crowdad could sit on the bloody things for five minutes while she had breakfast.

Then, in early May, I heard the tree.

Oh.

There were babies!

You couldn't hear a thing while the adults were away. The tree was just a tree. Gently swaying in the wind. Silent. But when a parent arrived?

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”.

In stereo.

Well, that cleared that up.

The Crow Restaurant changed overnight. Apparently producing crows is expensive. They started getting through around half a kilo of fresh pork or beef mince a day. Not cheap mince, either. They had standards. Twenty percent fat. Fresh. Prime. I was spending actual money feeding invisible birds in a tree, while I was living on soup made from marked down vegetables, and salads made from 50p packets of noodles with a little mayonnaise and a handful of peas! But I honestly didn’t mind. I am the one that shoehorned myself into their lives, earned their trust, did a happy dance every time they came a little closer. I can’t break our unspoken contract now.

The food would go down and one parent would appear almost immediately. Stuff the beak. Gone. The other would arrive almost on cue. Stuff the beak. Gone. Sometimes one collected while the other wandered around nearby, apparently fascinated by a completely unremarkable patch of grass.

Nothing to see here.

Certainly not a valuable food resource.

Just two ordinary crows doing ordinary crow things.

Is that pork?

Never seen it before in my life.

I wondered what on earth they were doing.

They were also taking increasingly circuitous routes back towards the nest. Roof. Tree. Chimney. Disappear. Reappear somewhere else. Backtrack. I assumed this was partly about not advertising the location to the gulls, although it was becoming increasingly academic because Crowdad had spent the previous ten days enforcing what appeared to be a roughly hundred-metre gull exclusion zone around the nest. He had become a little black surface-to-air missile. Gull enters airspace. Crowdad launches. Gull leaves airspace. Eventually the gulls seemed to decide that whatever was over there wasn't worth being screamed at and dive-bombed by an angry goth with dependants.

By the middle of May, Crowmum was fully back in action and looking remarkably well. Last year she'd emerged from parenthood looking as though she'd spent six weeks trapped in a tumble dryer. This year both of them were glossy, well fed and apparently coping beautifully. Probably because some idiot was supplying half a kilo of premium mince a day!

Crowdad was certainly enjoying himself. One delivery of meat produced a bizarre little celebration involving a wide-legged hop-hop-hop around in a circle. Crowmum ignored him. I can't prove she rolled her eyes. But she did.

By late May, things became frantic. Put down 100g of beef mince. Sixty seconds later: gone. Not eaten. Collected. Both crows would stuff as much as physically possible into their beaks and run. The tree had also become increasingly noisy. The babies were getting bigger. And somewhere inside that enormous mass of leaves, I knew there were young crows approaching the point where they were going to have to come out.

This concerned me slightly. The nest tree was big. Very big. Tall, fat and dense, with plenty of branches and reasonably forgiving ground beneath it. Fine. Unfortunately it was also overhanging the main road. Presumably the fledglings would work their way through the tree and emerge in the sensible direction. Unless one of them was a total idiot and walked along the wrong branch like the plank of a pirate ship.

I had, at this point, not met Putz.

The last week of May saw a marvellous heatwave hit the southwest. It was so very welcome! It was also half term. Surprise surprise, we were inundated with holidaymakers. A LOT of holidaymakers. Far more than is usual for the time of year. Town was absolutely buzzing, and you could barely see the paving for the people. I spent approximately half an hour there on the Saturday before remembering why tourists can be quite trying.

The families of 5 or 6 who insist on walking in a wide line, taking up the entire pavement.

The people who walk at snail’s pace and decide to make a sudden sharp left towards a shop just as you’re trying to overtake them.

The 2 people with 4 French bulldogs and a pug, all the dogs going in slightly different directions, straining on leads and scent marking everything that isn’t moving.

The idiots who walk around with their faces in their phones, no clue who they’re about to walk into, or that other people even exist.

The ridiculous number of people eating pasties while walking through town at 10am, leaving a trail of bits of pastry, meat and potatoes behind them.

The crowds. The noise. The smells.

Nope. Mission aborted.

I tried the beach instead. Less busy. Calming and tranquil. But wow the water was still cold! Lying on the sand and drying off in the sun afterwards? Divine.

Before the month was out, there was a crow on a chimney. A large, almost adult sized, fluffy, short-tailed crow making a strange throaty noise. It was also behaving like an idiot.

Crowdad, sitting on a chimney or the comms tower, was constantly watching. Sky. Ground. Gulls. Humans. Other crows. Possible threats. Possible food.

Junior, meanwhile, was examining the brickwork. Ooh, new thing, is it edible? Ow, it’s hard. Crowdad landed beside it. Junior immediately hunkered down, opened its beak and adopted the universal adolescent position of: Feed me.

Uh-huh. Baby. Not much of a baby, admittedly. More of a nearly adult-sized goth chicken with the survival skills of a damp sock. But definitely a fledgling. Later that afternoon it flew from the chimney back to the tree. There was a great deal of flapping. No gliding. No elegance. Just sustained application of wings until tree happened.

Then it did it again. Tree to chimney. Chimney to tree. Tree, around chimney, back to tree. It was practising. And, if I'm honest, beginning to show off. Just like Crow, her big brother from last year. Of course they’d have a mini Crow, confidence seemed to be in their genes.

Minnie. Yes, that name suits it. Minnie it is.

Meanwhile Crowmum kept appearing on different branches, only her back visible as she focussed her attention inwards.

The following day I saw it. Baby number two. Crowmum and Crowdad were taking food up to the chimneys now, rather than into the tree, so I had a clear line of sight to the proceedings. Minnie came out of the tree, made the flight and landed. Not beautifully, perhaps, but successfully. She hunkered down, opened her mouth and demanded payment.

Then the other one came out. It approached the roof. It overshot. Hit the tiles. Slid down them. For one horrible second I thought I was about to watch a baby crow fall off a roof. At the last moment it managed to get airborne again and flapped frantically back towards the tree. Crowdad went straight after it. Oh dear.

There are two parts to learning to fly.

This fledgling had apparently concentrated on the first one.

I named him Putz.

Over the next few days, the distinction became clearer. Minnie learned to land. Putz developed alternatives. The pair practised taking off from the thin upper branches of the tree, which bent and bounced under their weight and seemed an unnecessarily advanced place to learn anything. Minnie would flap away and increasingly arrive somewhere recognisable as a landing site. Putz would flap away and just….discover what happened next.

Sometimes what happened next was a chimney pot. Sometimes it was a gutter. Sometimes it was foliage. On one memorable occasion he went into a bush head first and remained there with his arse sticking into the air. There followed a period of vigorous rearrangement during which Putz attempted to establish which way up a crow was supposed to be. The answer, of course, was not that way.

The adults occasionally had to go into the tree after him following a particularly ambitious arrival. From where I was standing it looked remarkably like they were fishing the young crow out by his tail.

Minnie, meanwhile, was getting the hang of things. She was smaller and finer than her brother, and as her flying improved I started noticing her wings properly. When they spread, daylight showed between the long individual flight feathers, each marked with a pale stripe. She was bloody beautiful.

In the meantime, Putz flew into another thing.

Soon Minnie was coming down with Crowmum and Crowdad to eat. That was a big step. She remained cautious. The parents had apparently included Humans: Absolutely Not in the curriculum, so if I was outside she tended to stay on the roofs and wait. Once I went indoors, down she'd come.

Putz didn't. In fact, Putz disappeared. A day passed. Then another. I started to worry. His landings had been funny because he'd got up afterwards. A fledgling vanishing after repeatedly introducing himself to buildings at speed was less funny.

Crowdad was still carrying food away, though. That gave me hope. Perhaps Putz was somewhere out of sight, being fed. Perhaps he was fine. Perhaps he'd finally landed in something so comprehensively that the family had decided it was easier just to feed him there.

A week later he reappeared. On a roof. Excellent! Putz was alive. Now all he had to do was get off the roof. This turned out to be ambitious. He walked around the chimney pots. He looked over the edge. He walked back. Crowmum appeared. Putz begged. Crowmum left. Putz walked around the chimney pots again. He tried a different part of the roof. At some point he managed to lose his footing and slide down the tiles, arriving at the gutter face first. This was, apparently, preferable to flying.

Crowmum returned. There appeared to be a conversation. I couldn't hear the words, obviously, but I had children, I knew how it went. “Come on, just flap your wings.” Putz did not flap his wings. “You can fly.” Putz declined to comment. “You flew UP there!” Putz walked around the chimney again.

This went on for hours. By the end of the day Crowmum had visibly progressed through concern, encouragement, exasperation and into the final stage of parenthood: “For fuck's sake, Putz, MOVE!!”

As the daylight began to fade, Putz was faced with two choices. Join the family in the tree or spend the night alone in a chimney pot. His survival instinct kicked in and he finally did as he was told.

Putz survived his first few weeks out of the nest despite mounting evidence that gravity had developed a personal interest in him.

Minnie became increasingly adventurous.

Putz became increasingly... Putz.

And just like that, there were four of them again.