Crow Black

St Ives Estate, Bingley. W. Yorks. UK

I found this dead crow today and was struck by what an incredible biological adaptation it is. I was fascinated by the contrast between the soft fleshy body, floppy like a sack of semi hard jelly, the instantly warm soft down and feathers with the hard scaly claws, legs with needle sharp talons and the long hardened, arrow head of a beak - a fearsome weapon.

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"Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wondrous have been, and are being, evolved"

The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection - Charles Darwin