There is a tree in our front yard that is a home to crows, the crows fly in and out of the tree all day.  During the school term the crows steal food from the grounds, they steal yogurt containers, muesli bars, and tuck shop paper bags.  All of the rubbish from the food ends up under the tree.  But then something started to happen, there were dead animals under the tree every day for 5 days.  A rat, another rat, a top knot pigeon, a lorikeet, another rat.  I started to expect a corpse under the tree after a few days.

I buried all of the animals under the tree in among all of the litter under the tree.  It’s a huge pine so there are heaps of needles and dirt underneath to bury the animals.

After that first 5 days we’ve only seen a few more dead animals under the tree.  Mostly old ones, like half mummified rats and bird parts. Today I was reminded of all of the animals the showed up under the tree over that week after my partner mowed under the tree uncovering the poorly buried bodies (it’s super dry under the tree and hard to dig up).

As I have a bit of a collections of bones and body bits the corpses under the tree don’t bother me and  I can easily bury them when they do show up.  We don’t think the crows were actually killing the the animals but that the rats were poisoned (there were heaps of dead rats in the area at the time) and that a cat originally killed the birds and the crows stole the bodies.

Bird wing from the top knot dove

Rat skull