Let's Hear It For the Rook and Raven: for the Latter's sharing 'human attributes' such as Empathy, Anger and Inquisitiveness, the Former for its (Card-game) Childhood Associations, and Presence (and Outrageous Culling) in Our Area...

Yes, these birds (ravens, and their close cousins/bosom buddies the crows and magpies - corvids all) are really something else altogether. Though hardly - remotely - a long-term fan of any of these, if only because I've never particularly enjoyed/relished being dive-bombed and/or otherwise assailed by these 'feathered friends' throughout my lifetime, they're apparently smart as and peculiar in so many other ways...

Indeed, whether it's being swooped down upon by these various corvids and/or their distant avian relatives *the seagulls - a scavenger whose cherished status evidently by Maori is surely undeserved - my personal encounters with these flying creatures is something I could write screeds upon...

Also geese (of the duck family) are animals I've had a run-in with on one occasion - as I defended myself way out upon the Otago Peninsula from one specimen determined to bite through my well-positioned, newly-weaponized bicycle which was the only thing preventing me from all-out assault on the heels of a completely unprovoked attack... Thankfully I later heard by chance that a local farmer had had to put down that nasty specimen of bird, lots of other folk having been likewise aggressively accosted upon many an occasion...

Reminding me of a four-footed creature, the humble and harmless sheep...a mob of which once chased me unceremoniously down a rocky, shrub-infested crest of hillside in the same general area... around the same time (later 2007).

Not altogether dissimilar - in nasty nature or (undoubted) intention, anyhow - from any number of mean-eyed, menacing-looking, large cows as they no doubt envied those un-hemmed in by all the gates and fences containing them within unappreciated bounds...

*Whose territorial protectiveness, even obsessiveness, sometimes exceeds the bounds of merely protecting their tiny offspring...  . Whether at the Mornington Outlook or down around the old Roslyn Woollen Mills - or even walking down opposite Dunedin's large Roman Catholic Kavanagh College on my way to obtain unfluoridated (and unchlorinated) water supplies quite recently - their (at times collective) antics have engaged me in more than my fair share of due concern and even outright terror over the years.

Hey - in addition to the news item I heard overnight (September 30th, Northern Hemispherical - October 1st, Southern Hemispherical - Time on BBC world radio) - check out an interesting on-line article (I just stumbled upon): c/o https://www.Sciencealert.com/crows-ravens-corvids-best-birds-(etc): '13 Surprisingly Weird Reasons Why Crows and Ravens Are the Best Birds, No Question' (Michelle Starr: 31 December 2017). Indeed, I recall an RNZ National item thereabouts a little while ago also...