View from the natural world

Daisy let me sleep in a little this morning.  She is getting quite old and creaky and likes to lie on the day bed in my room as long as she can before she answers "the call of nature".  Usually she is anxious to get up at about 5:30 a.m. and keeps jumping off the bed onto the floor and clicking across the room, down the stairs, clicking on the kitchen floor, then up the stairs to stare at me lying there with my eyes closed, pretending to be asleep, hoping she'll buy it and get back onto her bed as well.  Sometimes it works.

This morning we slept in until about 7!  Once we get up, we have to get going for our walk before anything else happens.  Daisy can't just "do her business" in the backyard.  She has to have a walk.  (It sounds a bit like I'm her slave . . . maybe.)  I'm just as glad once we get going.  It's cool in the morning and the birds are singing and the air feels fresh.

Off we go.  Soon after we started, we could hear a murder of crows making quite a kerfuffle a couple of blocks from our house, so we headed that way to see what was up.  I am always a bit worried, because I don't want any animals to be hurt and the crows were sounding pretty worked up.  Crow babies live on the ground for several days before they can learn to fly well, and of course, they're very vulnerable when they're not able to fly to get away from predators.  Their parents do their best (if you've ever been dive-bombed by a crow, you know what I'm talking about) but there is a limit to what they can do.

Anyhow, we got to the spot and saw a lot of crows on the wires around a little house which appears to be awaiting demolition (Port Moody is busy transforming itself these days).  We looked over the fence and saw a mother raccoon and two baby raccoons (kits) in the yard.  I was afraid that we would see a struggling baby crow (chick), but we didn't -- the raccoons had some sort of plastic tray of pastries that someone had thrown out and they were feasting on it, so I guess the crows were cheesed because they wanted the pastries for themselves.  The mother raccoon seemed to feel like they had eaten all the pastry they needed and she wanted to go so she scaled the fence and walked along the top of it to leave, but the babies couldn't reach high enough on the fence to be able to hoist themselves up.  They tried but couldn't manage it.  Finally the mom came back and they disappeared into the berry bushes at the edge of the yard.  By that time, the crows had calmed down.  The pastry package was left behind, so maybe the crows can get a few crumbs now.