AIBU to feel guilty for not stopping a crow?

[AliceNotInChains]

Just seen a crow attacking a black bird nest down our driveway, all the black birds where dive bombing it and it didn’t care, it managed to pull a baby bird out of the nest, crow and baby fell onto driveway and crow was them divebombed by around 7 blackbirds 😱 it was throwing the baby around in the air, it was awful. I stopped watching but I’m assuming it got away with the baby. Now I feel guilty - I could have gone out and stopped it but I didn’t - it’s nature isn’t it 😞 would you have intervened?

Corvids and song birds have coexisted for millenia. Its human impacts, particularly in forestry and agriculture, that have decimated songbirds.

Bloody hell- I had to google crow grudges 😱😱😱

You can hardly avoid human impacts without removing people from the planet - our entire countryside is a managed landscape - and has been since humans existed - if you take predator control out of the equation you remove the balance. You can of course leave everything to to return to the "wild" but such a thing doesn't really exist anymore and its the managed landscape has far greater biodiversity than any rewilding

You should’ve stepped in.

Maybe it's more a small rural area of Scotland issue ... We're not going to be worried about thieves or sinkholes!

Crows are corvids, birds of prey similar to kestrels, falcons, owls etc. It’s brutal to see them steal baby birds from nests, but there would be no point intervening as the baby would die of shock (and probably internal injuries) even if you did manage to put it back in the nest. There’s also an element of Darwinism here, the nest was obviously not in a good spot, too accessible to the crow, so mummy blackbird needs to choose a different site next time. Sad, but as others have said, it’s nature, and baby crows need to eat too.

A jay emptied the great tit’s nest in our neighbour’s garden a couple of springs ago. I know because it stopped on the wall across from our kitchen window to rearrange its prey. It returned every 5-10 mins until it had emptied the nest. 😔

This is kinda true, if a sheep gets stuck on its back crows will eat its eyes. (But they don’t attack mobile, healthy sheep or lambs) It’s not malicious, the eyes are the softest easiest part to eat. I grew up on a farm and have seen it happen, I might check with my mum, but I have a vague memory of having a one-eyed ewe due to a crow.

I’ll probably get flamed, but foxes are far more destructive than crows, they’ll kill far more than they'll eat, decimating chickens, and killing small lambs, they are not the cute puppies that the media portrays them as. Farmers try to control fox populations for a reason, crows are only a risk to newly sown crops.

Thinking of changing my name to Crowscomingafteryou.......

Say what now?