Nesting Season

My mom has an African pied crow.  His name is Piper.  The floors in the house are laminate, which is necessary when you have a large, free-range bird.  He's about twelve, I think (they live to be 25-30 in captivity), and isn't the tamest of creatures.

We bought him from a place called the Corvid Ranch, in Alabama.  The guy who owns it breeds exotic corvids (ravens and crows) that can be kept as pets, used in movies, etc.  Have you seen the Windex commercials with the large black and white birds, talking about how grumpy they were that they couldn't tell when the glass door was open or closed?  Those were pied crows, and they came from the Corvid Ranch.

Most of the time, if they're selling a bird as a pet, they send hand-raised chicks.  This way, the bird has imprinted on humans and acts kind of like a super-intelligent dog.  They can even be taught to speak!

Not Piper.

See, before Piper, my mom had worked for years with wild ravens and crows.  She was part of a rehab team that would keep birds that could no longer survive in the wild (usually due to some human-inflicted injury), and they would then take those birds to schools, fairs, etc, and teach people about whatever bird that particular handler dealt with.  When we were looking for a pet, they didn't have any hand-raised chicks.  However, since my mom had experience taming wild beasts, the guy sent us one of his breeder birds.  So Piper came to us about as tame as a raven you'd encounter in a parking lot.

This was about eight years ago.  While Piper is still not as tame as we'd like, and never will be, he's mellowed out a lot.  He makes contented noises when you talk to him, he'll take food from your hand, and he only tries to bite you if he wants something you have.  Or he thinks you're not looking.  Or he's feeling ornery.  And he pulls the cats' and dogs' tails.  It's entertaining.

But right now, it's nesting season.  For a crow, that means stealing EVERYTHING.

So far, in his cage an various places around the house, we've found two spatulas, two pairs of scissors, the stand off a globe, several knives, five or six forks, three spoons, and anything else he can get his greedy little beak on.

That's pretty entertaining right there, but then today he learned how to use my mom's computer.

She came home to find that he'd opened files, surfed the web, and written jibberish on a word document.  I can only imagine what kind of havoc he'd wreak if he could spell.

About once every other day, my parents go around and retrieve whatever he's stolen.  Almost immediately he has everything back and then some.

Spring is weird in my house.