Watching a Crow Decide Whether to Stay or Fly Away

I Found the Crow First on a Power Line

I'm trying to get back to walking again to get stronger, so after I got attached to my Holter monitor this morning I walked all over Posada Lane and behind MedWorks to a drainage ditch. I took almost 300 photos, some of which you will see in future posts. But today I will show you the crow I followed. I first saw it when I had walked over to Las Tablas Road toward the hospital to get a shot of where they are rebuilding a medical complex that burned down a year or two ago. Then I heard some cawing and looked up.  That's when I saw it.

Crow on a Power Line. Will it Fly Away? © B. Radisavljevic

It appeared that the crow couldn't decide whether or not to fly to the tree. Eventually it made a decision and flew away. That was almost the end of the story. Until I walked back around the corner to Posada Lane.

My First Introduction to Crows

I've seen crows around all my life, but I first learned a bit about what they were like when I read Blacky the Crow by Thornton Burgess.  I highly recommend the Burgess animal stories for getting children acquainted with nature in a fun way.

I Find the Crow Again

I was almost back to where my car was parked when I stopped to take this photo. I had never noticed this tree before. The color resembled a sycamore at this time of year, but the leaves were wrong. A woman walked by, saw me with a camera, and asked me if I were taking a picture of the hawk. I told her I was taking a picture of the tree and was trying to figure out what it was. She said, "It's an oak." I knew the leaves were the right shape, but I'd never seen oak leaves so big. 

Red Oak, © B. Radisavljevic

This is my go-to book when trying to identify my local trees in San Luis Obispo County. It's written by a professor at Cal Poly.


There are some cheaper copies at eBay if you prefer that to Amazon.

As I found out later, she was right about the tree, but wrong about the "hawk." It turned out to be my elusive crow, or its friend. There were two of them. This is the one that stayed in one place long enough for me to get a shot. 

Another crow began to circle and call and it flew to the next tree. Finally this bird decided to follow. 

Crow in Flight, © B. Radisavljevic

I think being among the birds and the trees had a healing effect today. How often do you take nature walks?

What is your favorite way to interact with nature?

*****

E is for Electric Wires

For the purposes of this month's AtoZchallenge, E is for electric wires, also known as power lines . I love electricity. I wouldn’t want to be without it or deprive anyone else of it. But it does have something I don’t like – wires and poles. 

 As an amateur photographer who loves taking  pictures of trees and the sky, those electrical wires do have a way of ruining my potential pictures. In this respect, artists who paint have an advantage. They don’t have to paint in the wires they see. Or they can be creative in using them as they see fit, as Barbara Rosenthal, one of our local artists, did in this picture titled “Gaviota Line Dance,” which she displayed along with another picture with wires at the Phantom of the Arts Exhibit in Paso Robles, 2012. 

I am not yet, however, skillful enough with photo editing software to remove wires from photographs, so I try not to include them in the first place, if possible. It’s not always possible. An example is a Victorian home I photographed in Yreka, California. It didn’t matter where you stood or which direction you shot from, you could not escape the wires. It almost seemed, from a photographer’s point of view, that the house was wrapped in electrical wires.

The same is true of one of our most historic churches in Templeton – Bethel Lutheran Church. It’s a landmark, and it’s almost impossible to get a view of it without any wires.

I love the trees which line the streets near downtown Paso Robles. They often have gorgeous sunsets or cloud formations behind them. It’s bad enough that I have to include house tops, but inevitably there’s also a wire crossing some part of the picture, or an electric pole that looks out of place in the midst of a nature shot.

The only place I find poles and wires useful in scenery is when they act as perching places for my feathered friends. This high voltage pole is on Anderson  Road in Paso Robles off Highway 46 West.

I took this last picture in my back yard. There seemed to be a bird convention that day. They crowded the wire and also the tree below. When I took this, several had already flown away while I was focusing.

So while I love all the blessings electricity brings to my life, I do wish it appeared more often without the poles and wires over the streets and along country roads. Sometimes they just seem out of place.

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