There was a trash explosion next door. Our new neighbors have not gotten their trash cans (I think it took them six weeks to deliver ours), so they just put some bags out. They obviously forgot about the crows. I looked outside a while ago, and crap was all over the street. Fortunately, though, it appears to be migrating the other direction… south down the street and not toward our house.
There was also a seagull taking part in the trash mauling. It was quite a bit bigger than the crows and was not very friendly towards them. But after some observation, it was quite apparent that the crows were much more intelligent than the seagull (or at least so it seemed). The gull simply used a brute force method to get into the bags and whatnot and that was very inefficient. The crows, however, would actually pick stuff individually out of the bags and examine them. They only tore through stuff when appropriate. They were actually very cool to watch. There were three around a chinese-type takeout box that they had opened up, and they were all chowing down. It would have made a cool picture if I had a zoom powerful enough; no way I could get close enough otherwise.
It was not even a trash day today as collections have been moved up one day due to the recent icy weather. I guess I was the only person who knew about that. I did tell Mandy that yesterday when she came over to talk about going out to dinner today (last day of 25 for 25… 25 restaurants in the area have $25 prix fixe menus whereas their normal prices are, um, higher than that). We will be hooking up with Eve tonight, though, and will try to hang out with Mandy and Bryan this weekend sometime.