BIRD ON A SHEEP

Sheep, but no bird...

The other day I saw a bird on a sheep and thought to myself “Well, that’s something you don’t see every day…” although, to be fair, I don’t even see sheep every day either, although, living where I do, perhaps I see them more often than some. I paused for a moment to point it out, but, just a moment later, the bird hopped off the sheep and, to the eyes of the person I was pointing it out to, it merely became a bird next to a sheep, which is nowhere near as interesting, so they just had to take my word for it.

I didn’t even have the time to bring my camera to bear on this particularly strange moment, either, so you’re just going to have to take my word for it too, as I ponder once again upon “the pictures that got away…”

But not yet.

After all, there’s still that bird to consider… and, of course, that sheep.

It was lying there, in a soggy field, on a sunshiny day that seemed almost designed to mark the last of summer. It was, if it’s not too indelicate to mention it, a black sheep which rather made it stand out from its fellows in the field, or, at least it would have stood out if it hadn’t been, as I already mentioned, lying down.

The bird was a jackdaw, which meant that it, too, was black, which I only mention because it was, and not to cast any aspersions about whether it felt an affinity with the less than usual hue of the particular example of sheep-kind upon which it chose to alight.

Jackdaws do seem to be becoming ubiquitous these days. I can go almost anywhere in this country and be almost certain to see and hear a chorus of them lurking around in some tree or other, or on top of a building and even if I don’t see any other birds on my travels (which is, unfortunately, sometimes the very purpose of those journeys), the jackdaws will always be there, watching us watching them, like a permanent audience to our human follies and travails.

Number of species spotted: One.

So, to summarise, a jackdaw is not a rare thing to see, and to see a sheep is a slightly rarer thing, but to see a jackdaw on a sheep felt just a tiny bit unusual.

I watched it for a few seconds, because, up until I realised what it was, it was just some shapes moving unusually. I watched until those shapes formed into the sheep and the bird, and watched a little more as the bird pecked away at the back of the sheep foraging away for some meaty morsel or other which it had found, whilst the sheep seemed to just lie there, oblivious enough that I suspected for a moment that it might just be a dead sheep.

But then its ears flickered and all was well in its sheepish world, at least for the foreseeable or until the lorry came to take them all away.

Having decided that I wouldn’t just be pointing at a dead sheep, I took my moment to point it out, just as the jackdaw hopped to the ground, and so the shared moment was lost, although we did ponder for a moment upon the various examples in the natural world of the symbiotic relationship between certain creatures. Those egrets that perch on the back of buffalo, or the plovers which pick at the teeth of crocodiles, or the clown fish nestling amidst the deadly poisonous barbs of the anenome, or the cleaner shrimp lurking around in the mouths of eels, and I decided that it was probably not one of those relationships, otherwise it wouldn’t be all that unusual to see a bird on a sheep.

Perhaps it just wanted to keep its feet warm...?