POTD: Natural Tendencies

Natural Tendencies
Bozeman, Montana
2016

When I started photographing crows and ravens some years ago, a wish of mine was to someday come across one with a red berry in its mouth. I thought it would take a long time to stumble on to such a scene, but it was actually only a couple of months before I was able to capture this image:

Crow With Berries
Bozeman, Montana
2009

Since 2009 when I took the Crow With Berries shot,  I’ve come across other instances of crows or ravens with something red or reddish-orange in their mouths, so came to realize it was not as rare an event as I thought it might be. But what I noticed in my old studio at our mountain house the other day takes that kind of occurrence to a whole other level.

I did not setup this scene on purpose. While moving my studio into town a year or so ago, I temporarily and haphazardly pinned a crow mobile I had to the wall by the door. I don’t know if it ended up positioned like in today’s POTD from the beginning or if it happened later somehow, but I just noticed it the other day when I was up there doing some work. Perhaps there’s a natural attraction of crows to red objects even when the crow is inanimate!