Nesting Chronicles — May 20

May 21, 2026May 20, 2026 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 3 Comments

It’s an especially tense time on Nest Watch at the moment.

Some local crows are getting close to having fledglings leave the nest, while others, having lost the first nest, are starting all over again, searching for twigs and moss to rebuild in another location.

Overhead, the local bald eagles and hawks are hunting, pursued by groups of furious crows. These are particularly scary times for the crows with nests located in high spots!

There is so much nesting news, I’ll have to limit this update to just a few of the local crow families, with more dispatches later.

Today, I’ll tell you how things are going for Marvin and Mavis, Norman and Nancy and Sneezy and Sue. All of these crow pairs are still at their first nests of the season and tantalizingly close to having fledglings fledge!

Marvin and Mavis

Marvin and Mavis are playing their nesting cards close to their feathery chests.

You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away and know when to run
You never count your hatchlings when you’re sittin’ on the wee nest
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the fledgin’s done

— With apologies to Kenny Rogers

Despite visiting them at least twice a day, I still can’t tell for sure where they’ve built their nest — although I’m beginning to have my suspicions. That they DO have a nest is certain, as Mavis is mostly absent, appearing in the open only occasionally to stretch luxuriously and preen her nest-cramped feathers.

Marvin seemed to have a lot of white on his beak the other day — a sign that the eggs have hatched. A little sidebar here on the significance of White Beak Day, as featured in the 2026 City Crow Calendar:

WHITE BEAK DAY is the first day of the nesting season when crow parents appear with white stuff on their beak. That white material is fecal matter from their hatchlings. Sounds a bit yuck, but it’s all part of Nature’s amazing design.

Once the eggs are hatched, the nest is full of tiny pooping baby birds. It’s critical to keep the nest as clean and bacteria-free as possible, and Mother Nature provides fecal sacs for this purpose. While disposable diapers are not available for birds, the hatchlings do excrete into handy sacs of mucous membrane, which the parents can carefully remove from the nest.

When the hatchlings are very young, their digestive systems are not yet fully developed, so their droppings are nutrient-rich so, with a practical “waste not want not” philosophy, the crow parents will often consume the sacs. Sometimes they burst — hence the white on the parental beaks.

It’s a happy day as it means that eggs have hatched successfully and the crow family is one step closer to a successful nesting season. Today I saw Earl, Norman and Sue with white on their beaks!

Marvin with tell-tale white marks on his beak.

I haven’t seen Lou (their fledgling from last year who stayed with them all winter) for the past couple of weeks. It’s too early to tell if his absence is temporary or if Mom and Dad have told him it’s time to move on and be an independent young crow.

Below: Marvin in fully-fluffed fierce guard mode. Smart, yet casual.

Norman and Nancy

I’m really hoping for success for these two as they embark upon their fourth nesting season with no fledglings to show for their efforts to date.

Norman and Nancy earn top marks for an early start this year, but their site selection is somewhat risky. They chose to use the same tree they’ve used in previous years, where they lost the nest to raccoons at least twice. This time, they’ve built near the top of the tree, reducing the raccoon risk, but putting them closer to the “eagle zone.”

A bedraggled Nancy leaves the nest for a well-earned swish and shake break.

However, judging by the questionable items I’ve had to fish out of our bird bath over the past couple of weeks, and the white on their beaks, I think Nancy and Norm are currently feeding some fledglings up there. They like to pre-soak food for the babies to keep them hydrated and fed in one go.

It seems that the menu over at Norman and Nancy’s is rodent-forward. While this good for rat population control, I am a bit tired of disinfecting the bird bath after fishing out soggy rodent-remnants. I’m now trying to divert their food prep efforts from the bird bath to a simple plastic bowl of water that’s easier to clean a few times a day.

I’m keeping all my fingers and toes crossed that we’ll see some little Normans and Nancies (is that the plural of Nancy??) soon.

Norman cawing at a gull that flew too close to the nest this morning.

Sneezy and Sue

For a young couple, Sneezy and Sue are doing well on the nesting front. They seem to have stayed roughly in the territory they claimed last spring when Bongo and Bella opted to move out of the cat-inhabited territory. Luckily, the cat seems to have gone now. I think Bongo and Bella would like to reclaim that part of the block, but Sneezy and Sue are settled in now, and having none of it.

Like Norman and Nancy, Sneezy and Sue built their nest early and they chose a well camouflaged spot in a dark-leafed tree. They’ve maintained a very low profile for weeks now, with Sue emerging from the nest over the past couple of weeks, suitably adorned with the white streaks of parental success.

Young Syd, Sneezy and Sue’s fledgling from last year, is around intermittently and helping to guard the nest.

Let’s hope that the nesting luck holds for this trio of crow families for the next few crucial weeks.

In my next post, I’ll let you know how things are going for Bill and Irene and their neighbours, Earl and Echo.

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City Crow Stories … A Year On

March 9, 2023April 29, 2023 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 10 Comments

These last three years have seen time moving at a peculiar pace. Individual days have seemed very long , yet somehow entire years have rushed past like a river in flood.

Perhaps that’s just me. Nevertheless, it seems both a very long time ago and also “only yesterday” that I started on my little book, City Crow Stories. After much hooing and hawing (literary terms) about what exactly to write about, I decided to try and let the crows tell their own tales by profiling seven of my local crowquaintances.

As a crow watcher, you can never get too complacent. One day you think you know exactly who’s who on the local crow scene and the next day you go out for the daily catchup only to find that the crow chess pieces have moved. It’s a new game and a new puzzle.

Time now, I think, for some updates on The Magnificent Seven I wrote about — and what I do and don’t know about them all a year on.

Starting today with …

MARVIN & MAVIS

Marvin and Mavis were the first two crows profiled in the book.

Until last fall I’d see them every day in my garden — this summer bringing with them their fledgling, Lucky.

I wrote extensively about their busy summer of parenting in the Crow Parenting series.

Lucky, August 2022

To my great happiness, Lucky has stayed with Marvin and Mavis over the winter. This much I know!

Marvin, Lucky and Mavis on a neighbour’s roof last week.

It used to be very clear that, if there were crows in the garden, those crows would be Marvin and Mavis. Due to a local population shift, things are not longer quite so easy.

When Marvin and Mavis lost “their” stand of poplar trees 2020, they had to go slightly further afield to find safe nesting sites. They tried the tree across the alley from us several years ago, twice, but lost the nests both times to racoons. They refuse to try that tree again.

Not so these two newcomers to the ‘hood …

The new crows had better luck and managed to raise one fledgling, in spite of the raccoon raids.

Naturally, they now think our back yard is theirs too.

I had to curtail the daily peanut offerings on the back deck as they were in danger of casing crow riots. The newcomer crows cannot keep a secret, and crows from the other end of the block have started keeping a close eye on things and now zoom in whenever I open the back door.

One of the new crow neighbours

Apart from the general racket, I was worried that some crow was going to get hurt in the competitive dive bombing that would ensue as soon as a single peanut appeared.

Marvin, as often seen these days, in fierce “head feathers up” mode to try and deter the interlopers

On snowy days I still put out some provisions for the raucous gang, but mostly I now try and wait to see if Marvin and Mavis come later in the day for a quiet visit, or go out and find them on “their” corner.

Marvin and Mavis serenading from upper deck

With the current crowfusion, it’s harder to tell exactly who’s who at a glance. Mavis still has one slightly blunt claw so it’s often up to zooming in on feet to make a reasonably accurate ID. That, and noting the direction from which they arrive.

Mavis in the snowbell tree, Dec 2022

Marvin, Mavis and Lucky — October 2022

The photo above is Marvin on Christmas morning, 2022 beside a small tree. This is one of the saplings finally planted to replace the lost stand of poplars. It will be while before the new trees are nest-worthy, but a small sign of hope for the future.

A quiet visit from just Marvin and Mavis (and sometimes Lucky) is a rarer thing that it used to be — but it still happens and is all the more appreciated.

Stay tuned for the next City Crow Story update …

Crow Therapy, January 2020

January 11, 2020January 11, 2020 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 24 Comments

2020 has left me feeling rather hopeless so far. Everything I’ve thought of writing about seemed trivial to the point of being worthless.

As usual, it took a crow to get me to pull my metaphysical socks up.

It helped, I’m sure, that a day without rain permitted me and my air cast to venture out past the confines of the back yard.

It been early December since I’ve been able to get around far enough to check on the corvid situation and I was happy to get out and see Mabel and family, Art and the gang and Ada the young crow.

I’m not sure why, but it was Ada who adjusted my mindset.

I’d been thinking that posting pictures of crows and other birds on social media, even making art from my bird images, seemed just so inadequate. I should make more impactful, statement-making art. I should quit taking photographs altogether and devote myself to action for climate, social and political justice.

Possibly all of those things are true, but Ada pointed out that sometimes the best thing you can do is keep on keeping on with the small, hopeful projects.

My photographing and writing about my local crows is unlikely to change the world.

I do have small, subversive ambitions. I hope that my words and images create familiarity with other species … leading to love and protective instincts … leading to action.

So, here is Ada.

She came down to see me and I put some peanuts down for her, but she was being intimidated by some more senior crows. She was tempted, I could see, to fly away and leave them to it, but she stood her ground.

You can see she gives a nervous little wing flap after the other crow caws above her, but ultimately decides to stick it out. She did get the peanuts in the end.

So, there you are. Just another little bird anecdote.

More coming in 2020.

If you feel you need daily #crowtherapy or #birdtherapy you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, where I try to post at least once a day.

Ada also wanted me to pass this on. If you’d like to help out the countless creatures displaced and injured by the fires in Australia, you can donate to WIRES, an Australian non-profit wildlife rescue association. To help people who have lost everything in the bush fires, you can donate to the New South Wales Rural Fire service.