Carrie Griffis Nuts About That Suet

I've tried many times to attract carrion-eating birds by waiting motionless, pretending to be dead. Corvids can be fooled easily, but for large Old World vultures, you need sunglasses. Apparently, they can detect eye movement while flying a few hundred feet high. Once, the vultures circled low, landed a few hundred feet away, and approached very slowly on foot. But I was never able to stay motionless long enough for them to get really close. I was in the Kushka city dump in Turkmenistan, and there were too many flies. I guess it would be easier to do in a colder place, like Tibet, but you don't really need to there because the vultures aren't as shy.

Hooded Crows that winter in Moscow are known for their intelligence. In cold weather, people often hang bags of meat out of their windows if they don't have enough space in their freezers. Crows regularly rob these bags. If the meat is too large to swallow, they sometimes take it to a subway air vent to thaw.