Hey yma!

Don’t know if it’s available in the UK yet, but thought you might be interested in this book (I’ll wait for the peaperback)

CROW PLANET: Essential Wisdom From the Urban Wilderness

Did you know that crows recognize human faces? To prove this, she writes, a researcher at the University of Washington conducted an experiment. Volunteers who had captured and banded crows (something crows resent) while wearing caveman masks were cawed at and dive-bombed whenever they re-entered crow precincts. When the same volunteers walked through the crow zone with their faces hidden by Dick Cheney masks, “the crows left them entirely alone.” (Presumably, this reflected no political bias.) Affectingly, Haupt describes “crow funerals” in which a “stillness” settles around a deceased bird as other crows “cluster about the crow in perfect silence,” and records evidence of crows at play — basking in the sun, “sprawled on one side with their wings hanging open … like black-feathered Madame Bovarys” or catching falling cherry blossoms.
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And while she may hesitate to anthropomorphize the bird, she is unable to avoid, in one instance, caninifying it — comparing a brood of fledglings who landed on her lawn and uprooted her seedling carrots to playful Labrador puppies. She gently spritzed the young crows with a hose, hoping they’d flutter away and spare her crop. “Instead,” she writes, “all four of them gathered under the spray, flapped their wings and opened their bills, in what appeared to be absolute joy. I laughed, but in that slightly imbalanced way that could turn into crying if someone looked at me the wrong way.” Over the next few days, she brought out the hose again so they could play some more.