Crows

Before starting on the Crow Moon journal quilt, I had to find out what crows "looked like" - and happened to see some while walking on Hampstead Heath. And whipped out the sketchbook. They do move around quite a lot - but the idea wasn't to make beautiful drawings, it was to look - to notice mass and angles -After that I started noticing crows everywhere, and sometimes having another go on paper -
So when this book appeared I just had to buy it, if only for the cover -
It's marvellous reading. The author moved to the Norfolk countryside and became fascinated by a large rookery nearby. The books starts with the birds arriving to roost for the night - "they tunnel into view as if breaking through a membrane". Apart from wonderful word-images, the book is full of information on corvids - the largest black one in UK is the northern raven, then crow, rook, jackdaw; the "colourful" ones are magpies and choughs.

Rooks and crows are hard to tell apart - adult rooks have a bare patch of skin around the beak, and the rook's bill is larger than the crow's. But mainly, crows are solitary or in pairs, whereas rooks are sociable. The East Anglian adage is: "Where tha's a rook, tha's a crow; and where tha's crows, tha's rooks".

Crows fly in a dead straight line when going somewhere in particular - hence the phrase, "It's .. miles as the crow flies."