There's always someone smarter

Did you spot the special feeding of the crows in Bombay yesterday?

Several houses laid out food in the morning, on plates made of banana leaves. This feeding of crows is one small part of Pongal, the Tamil harvest festival.

Not that Bombay's crows need any help with finding food!

They're among the smartest birds I've seen.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw two of them balancing coolly on top of a moving taxi, pecking at the bag of meat loaded on it. It was Bakr-Id that day, and the taxi had the remains of the day's sacrifice of goats. The two guys in the taxi had no clue their food was being eaten on the sly. My driver laughed when I said, look at those crows making fools of those men!

Another common sight in Bombay is crows stealing fish. You'll see them launching stealth attacks on vans and handcarts and taxis, merrily making a meal of the day's fishing catch.

Like I said, crows are smart. The only time that they get hoodwinked is by that other clever Indian bird, the koel.

The koel (the Indian cuckoo) lays its eggs in crows nests. And baby koels keep the deception going by cawing like crows. Devious, man!

Speaking of cuckoos - we learnt this rather philosophical Sanskrit poem at school. It's about the fine art of discernment:

Kakah krishna pikah krishna
Ko bheda pika kaka yoho?
Vasanta samaye praptey
Kakah kakah pikah pikaha

The crow is black, and the cuckoo is black
What difference, then, between crow and cuckoo?
When spring arrives, it's easy to tell**
That the crow is a crow, and the cuckoo a cuckoo.

**alluding of course, to the sweet song of the cuckoo in spring.