Bad bird roundup

- Here's one we haven't seen in a while: Once again, animals in the Middle East are suspected of being secret agents. In Sudan, a vulture that was captured and found to be fitted with a GPS system and tags reading "Israel Nature Service" and "Hebrew University, Jerusalem" is accused of being an Israeli spy.  Yeah, sure, "migration study," that's what they all say.

-Even very small birds can interfere with business: In Scotland, a 24-hour supermarket has been forced to cut back its hours because of a robin (pictured above) and a pigeon:

An assistant at the supermarket said: “We’ve had to start closing the store for a while at 11pm, when it’s quiet. All the staff have to go to the staff room and wait while the birds are chased out of the store.”

-In a cemetery in Northern Ireland, thousands of decorative stones had been disappearing from graves over a period of weeks. Locals were baffled, but if only people read this blog they'd solve these cases sooner: it was another case of grave-desecrating crows.

Finally, a woman visiting a family member's grave caught the birds in the act, and the next day, the caretaker saw the culprits - and their lookouts - for himself:

"They stripped the grave bare, it was unbelievable.Some crows stood on the headstone looking around while the rest were picking the stones off the grave."

When the solution to the mystery was reported to the person who'd first noticed the missing stones, she was reportedly 'delighted.' Perhaps she thinks it will be easier to thwart a bird than a human criminal. But as we've seen before, those birds can hold a grudge. So good luck, but they can't say I didn't warn them.