Man Notices Crows Dropping Strange Foods in His Bird Bath Every Day — Then He Realizes Why

In one of those rare occurrences, the breeze of Cambridgeshire is enshrouded in a strange mystery - a mob of suspicious crows is conducting a secret operation. Some people have reported seeing them hovering around KFC’s trash bins and stealing dumped chicken fragments. Others have spotted the queer gang hanging around baby chickens. Oddly enough, instead of taking home these chicks’ carcasses for dinner, these crows are dropping the drumsticks into the shallow pool of a local bird bath. Andy Purvis, the 62-year-old, was exasperated by the brazen behaviour of the birds. He reported the incident to the BBC.

Every morning for two years, Purvis went on noticing these cooked chicken drumsticks swimming in his bird bath located in his garden in St Ives. He shared that the crows deposit these drumsticks in the bathtub and then fly away. While the drumsticks softened, they returned a few hours later to pick them up, as if using the bird bath as a bowl of free milk to dunk their cookies. "This started about two years ago and has progressively gotten worse," Purvis said.

Purvis revealed that now the party drops chicken drumsticks in batches of “four or five” each day. “At first we just thought it was people just putting the odd carcass out, but it's too much now to be just coming from family homes,” he added. Fed by the daily ritual of finding chicken nibbles in his bird bath, Purvis reached out to social media users to trace the source of this mystery. "I hope highlighting the issue will shame the person or business to manage their food waste more responsibly," he reflected. By noticing that some of the drumsticks were quite meaty, he deduced that the crows must have stolen them from somewhere nearby.

Although many birds are known to dip and soak hard foods to soften the texture, this seemingly presumptuous behavior of the crows was a bit over the top. But according to the British Trust for Ornithology, this behavior is very common to them, given their “extremely high intelligence.” They added that crows would go on to solve complex puzzles to scavenge food. "They are often seen soaking dry bread, etc, in water to soften it up before eating it, or feeding it to their chicks," a spokesperson shared with BBC.

Crows, though intelligent, are infamous for displaying aggressive behaviors towards humans. They would hold grudges against humans, dive bomb into their yards, poke their beaks on their heads, and yelp angry calls. But there’s another facet of them that’s quite surprisingly, opposite to this. National Audubon Society reports that crows, sometimes, are known to leave behind objects like keys, lost earrings, bones, twigs, or rocks for humans who feed them, a behavior that John Marzluff, conservation ecologist, calls “gifting.”

In Purvis’ case, however, the gift is too kooky to be received with compassion. Unless Holmes catches this culprit crow gang, Purvis will not receive his typical bird guests, all those enchanting hummingbirds, cockatiels, doves, sparrows, and robins. They should rather choose a new bathhouse for themselves until then.