The Friends We Didn’t Plan

Today we’re going slightly off topic. Not entirely, because it’s still about animals and the people who love them, but this time it isn’t about dogs.

Walking the same park since 2007 means you meet people. You make friends, with the people and with their dogs. But something else happened to us along the way, something rather more unusual. We became friends with a family of crows.

Here’s how it started.

We didn’t know much about crows back then, and honestly we can’t remember exactly how it began or how many years ago it was. We probably just threw one of them something to eat one day. What we didn’t know was that this small brain would remember us, and would proceed to stalk us from that day to this.

We named her Bobby, after the chess player Bobby Fischer. Pavel loves chess, and it was Pavel who started this whole strange friendship in the first place.

We began feeding her every day. We’d buy her dried mealworms, ham, whatever treats we could find. And then, as nature tends to arrange things, crows live in pairs, and one day Bobby introduced us to her partner. From then on we had two mouths to feed.

Passengers, unticketed

Over time our meetings became completely ordinary. Every week the crows would come out to greet us. And because this has gone on for so long now, they’ve got used to our dogs and our dogs have got used to them. So they simply walk along with us. Stowaways.

They’ll fall in with the group and follow us across the park, and they have that particular slightly comic way of moving that makes us laugh every single time.

There was one occasion we still think about. We’d been away on holiday for a whole month. When we came back and went to work for the first time, we walked into the park absolutely buzzing to see Bobby and her partner again. The moment we spotted her we shouted “Bobby!” and threw our arms open. And she came running towards us, delighted.

That was when we noticed the people sitting on a blanket under a tree, watching the entire scene with a look of complete disbelief.

Aunt and uncle

One spring, Bobby and her other half started building a nest. We thought, right, we’re going to be an aunt and uncle. And so we were.

Our wonderful pair had a baby. The baby was appalling. Shrieking constantly, permanently demanding food. But watching the little one grow up was something else entirely. And eventually that grown-up youngster found a partner of his own.

So now we have four crows. We’re just waiting for the young pair to have a baby of their own. Four will become five. Then six. And then presumably it simply never stops.

What they showed us

We came into the park one day and saw one of our crows turning something over in her feet. We were slightly alarmed, assuming it was some poor dead creature. It was a tennis ball. She was playing with it. Tossing it up, chasing after it, rolling it along the ground.

More than once they’ve grabbed our dogs by the tail. One of them once landed on a dog’s back, and because he had such thick fur he didn’t feel a thing. He only realised something was up when she took off again.

On hot days our crows drink from the same bowls as our dogs. And in nest-building season, when we’re brushing the dogs out in the park, they sit in the trees and wait for us to finish. Then they take the dog hair for their nests.

That last one is the thing that got us. Because a bird that watches you brush a dog, works out that the hair is useful, and waits for you to be done, is doing something we hadn’t given crows credit for. It sent us off reading about them, watching films about them, and the more we learned the wider our eyes got. They recognise human faces. They tell each other which people can be trusted and which can’t. They solve puzzles, they help each other, they play. If you’ve never read anything about crow intelligence, we’d genuinely recommend it. These birds are extraordinary.

But honestly, the reading only confirmed what the tennis ball had already told us.

The best part

Every year when we go away on holiday, it’s hard to leave them. We think about them while we’re gone, wondering how they are, whether everything’s alright, whether they’re still in our park and whether they still remember us.

And that’s probably the most beautiful part of the whole thing.

To have an animal that treats you as a friend while remaining completely wild. Free. Independent. Undomesticated. We can’t take them home with us. We can’t hug them when we feel like it. We can’t keep them.

And yet after all these years they still come to us. They recognise us. They wait for us. They walk with us, and they let us be part of their world.

Because sometimes the best friendships are the ones you never planned.