Why the Rain Wont Fall

One of Rustle Crow’s relatives – or it could be Rustle himself! – has set up a maternity unit in Rustle’s old home.

From the various clicks, caws and chuckles that have started to drift down from the nest it would seem the happy event has taken place and we have some proud crow parents on the property once again.

If you look very carefully at the top centre of the nest, you can just about make out a baby crow beak peaking out

On Friday, while I was peering up at the nest and trying to see if I could spot our new arrival, Raymond – our garden helper – sidled up to me, shaking his head and tut-tutting.

“What’s wrong Raymond?”, I asked, expecting him to tell me that worms were eating the oranges again, or that he needed more fertilizer to put on the cabbage seedlings.

Instead he pointed up at the crows nest and answered ” Those birds, Madame. They are bad. We must chase them”.

What?!

“Oh? Why? What is bad about them?”

“They are keeping the rain away. Every time the rain starts to come they flap their wings like this” and he demonstrated, a pretty good impression I thought “and then the rain is afraid and it goes away”

“Rain rain go away, come again another day”

A crow with a view; making sure the rain has gone

Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge: Ground

A crow eating groundnuts. On the ground. Could it be Rustle?

Spud, hungry after a hard day’s rolling about in the dirt.

Breaking ground.

Filling in the pivot wheel ruts with gravel.

Groundnut harvest time.

Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge (Day Five): Rustle Crow

This is my final entry in the Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge. I have had a lot of fun taking part and I would like to thank Cee from Cee’s Photography Blog for asking me to join. Cee is a very active blogger and she always posts something every day. She also runs various daily photo and writing challenges and offers helpful advice and encouragement to everyone who takes part – I don’t know where she finds the energy! If you haven’t already, I recommend that you pop over to her site to have a look at her work – her photos and accompanying stories are beautiful.

Colonialist’s Blog is my nominee for today. He describes his home as being “on the edge of that pond called the Indian Ocean” and I have to admit I am a little bit jealous of that! I enjoy the humour on Colonialist’s Blog and hope that you will too.

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Rustle Crow

Rustle was born in December 2007 in a nest on the top of the internet mast at the back of our garden.

It was the rainy season and a particularly violent storm had caused some damage to the mast, cutting off our internet supply (this happens every year!), so we called in the internet people to come and fix it.

One of the internet men climbed onto the mast, got half way up and then came down again. He declared that the problem had not been caused by the storm but that he could see a crows nest at the top and that this was why we had no signal. He had come down to fetch a stick which he was going to use to destroy the nest (and in the process kill whatever was in it).

Luckily for Rustle, Last Born was visiting us for Christmas and he was having none of that! He donned a backpack, shimmied up that mast and was back down again with a baby crow safely tucked in his backpack before the internet guy could say “No! Wait!”.

It’s a long way up there!

I don’t think there is an easy way to determine the sex of a crow, but it was decided that the chick was a boy, so he was named Rustle (had it been a girl, her name would have been Cheryl).

Rustle in his new, less elevated, home

He was quickly tamed and soon became a member of the family, keeping us entertained with his antics. He even got his own Facebook page.

Like all birds, Rustle loved to bath and we always kept a dish of water handy for this.

Having no windows in the house, the problem was keeping him out of the house when he was wet!

Once Rustle grew up he left home. I was quite sad about that, but at the same time pleased that he was able to live his life as a wild bird, not locked up in a cage forever.

We are often visited by crows in our garden and when we do I always go outside and call his name, wondering if one of them is Rustle.

Is that Rustle up there?

A couple of weeks ago while driving around in the fields taking photos for this post I came across some crows feeding on peanuts that had been dropped by the harvester.

One of them broke away from the crowd and flew towards me, banking and swooping over my head. I like to think it was Rustle saying “hello”.