When you work for newspapers in the information age, you get pretty good at making yourself indispensable to whatever media outfit you're working for.
In 2024, most teenagers have a fully equipped technological newsroom in their pockets (don't tell them or we're all out of a job) and none of the qualms or reservations about only publishing when it's meaningful.
They're also astonishingly cheaper to hire than a trained journalist (don't tell my boss or I - specifically - am out of a job), to say nothing of the fact that newsrooms have been getting smaller for years even as their output has increased exponentially and become equally more varied. (Do you know how to make an infographic in under four minutes using a data set you just cleaned yourself? Because I do ... now).
Suffice it to say that when you're in the lion's den, you get used to finding ways to remind the big cats that even though you're a bit of a silly goose who writes a few hundred words a day about some exciting bird facts you just Googled while the grown-ups go around tirelessly revealing truths, exposing corruption and generally keeping the place from falling apart, you're still a vital and important part of this industrial outfit and everyone would miss me if I were gone.
Having said all that, one of our news photographers (we won't say who because he's also very vital to this organisation) took some photos of birds yesterday, and I have to fill this column somehow. So, here we go:
The crows are framing the bin chickens in Newcastle, and it's a crime that I'm determined to expose.
On Wednesday afternoon, outside the Ibis on Hunter Street, a murderous gang of mercantile crows (they could have been ravens, but who can actually tell the difference?) villainously raided the skips and scattered their contents about the crime scene.
Notwithstanding the undeniable evidence of these dastardly deeds, it is a truth universally acknowledged that crows are the criminals of the bird world. Everyone, including David Attenborough (probably), says so. They steal, they travel in murders (look me in the eye and tell me that's not suspicious), and they hold grudges. Don't believe me? The prosecution calls Professor John Marzluff to the perch.
In 2011, a five-year study co-authored by this similarly indispensable bird scientist found that crows were not only clever enough to recognise faces but also "consistently scolded" their perceived enemy. Professors donned two Halloween masks - one worn while trapping crows at several locations and another worn as a control - and after a little over a year, the birds could recognise the dangerous mask and scold the wearer with consistent squawking.
The dangerous mask was of a caveman, and the control mask was of US vice-president Dick Cheney.
I'm giving you more information than you need because you have to believe that this was an actual study, and also that crows think Dick Cheney was the good guy.
Now, y'Honour, Topics may be just a humble, small city and bird-brained scribbler, but to my mind, the crows have it in for us. And the Ibises.
As if any further evidence was needed, crows can also read street lights, according to another study and their brains account for more than two per cent of their total body weight.
To use the scientific term, that's a huge brain.
Proportionally (and this is actually true), they have more brains per pound than most human news reporters (and probably even some photographers).
A 2020 study in the journal Science even suggested that carrion crows show "a neuronal response in the palliative end brain during the performance of a task that correlates with their perception of a stimulus.
Such activity might be a broad marker for consciousness". So, not only are the birds clever, but they know it, too. (Please don't tell my boss. I can't lose my job to a bird. What would my poor mother think?)
Therefore, thus, and in summary (since it has been at least a few hundred words since I have made anything even close to a point), the prosecution asserts that not only did the crows, with malice of forethought, frame the humble bin chicken on the afternoon of the crime outside the hotel that bears their name, they knew they were doing it.
Motive, means, opportunity.
Ladies and gentlebirds of the jury, I caw murder! A murder most fowl!
The prosecution nests.
