【Watch When the Camellia Blooms Online】

Australians spend a large part of their spring trying to avoid being mercilessly swooped by magpies,Watch When the Camellia Blooms Online and now crows are getting in on the act.

Crows are notoriously intelligent and largely avoid humans out of fear, but if behavioural changes over the last 10 years are anything to go by, the super-brained devils of the sky are abandoning their fear. And they never forget a face.

SEE ALSO: Wedding photo session besieged by angry attacking magpies

It was when ecologist Darryl Jones of Australia's Griffith University saw a crow make a nest outside his office -- the first known instance of one made on a human structure -- that realised he might be witnessing symptoms of a mini-evolution.

---

You May Also Like

---

---

Jones quickly experienced the glaring downside of the crows new behaviour. "These crows on my building attack me," he told Mashable.

"They don't hit me but they go within 3 cm (1.1 inches) of my head and do it by surprise, from behind. I have lots of colleagues that don’t get swooped, looking out at me. I look up at them as I'm being terrified by these bloody birds and they're all laughing at me."

Mashable Trend Report Decode what’s viral, what’s next, and what it all means. Sign up for Mashable’s weekly Trend Report newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

The instances of crow swooping are eerily similar to that of their magpie cousin.

Jones sees the change back as symptomatic of rapid urbanisation. "As an animal, if you can overcome the issue of not being scared of people all the time, you've got heaps of food around. They're slowly, slowly becoming what's known as 'habituated' to people and they've lost their fear. As soon as you lose your fear you don't mind swooping people."

Over in Vancouver, Canada, crow attacks became so prevalent in some areas, that last year researcher Jim O'Leary, went and made a map of the instances of civilian swoop-age.

O'Leary spoke with Motherboardabout the project saying "People were coming in after getting whacked on the head after being dive-bombed by a bird," adding that the attacks were most severe during nesting seasons when crows were "aggressively protecting their young."

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Australians are used to magpies swooping with unsettling regularity during spring. Soon crows too, might be added to the "things in Australia that will try to kill you" list.

[H/T ABC]

• Science
• Deals
• Tech
• Entertainment
• Digital Culture
• Life
• Games
• Shopping

• Best portable power station deal: Save 44% on the Jackery Explorer 100 v2
• The Critics Hate Art So That It May Thrive
• Monday: Terry McDonell and Graydon Carter at 92Y
• The Case of the Shrinking Mannequins: Fashion Week and Body Image
• Turtle Beach Recon 50P gaming headset deal: 28% off
• Love Poems from the Fourteenth Century
• Elena Ferrante Doxxed by Some Guy Whose Name I Won’t Use
• Staff Picks: Nicholson Baker, Alex Prager, Gary Panter
• Amazon Spring Sale 2025: Best LG OLED TV deal
• Look: New Paintings by Sebastian Blanck

• Your star sign actually determines how you use your iPhone, trust us
• Trump's first expanded tweet could have been 140 characters
• Reddit bans board where men posted misogynistic content and even advocated rape
• Will Hopper die in Stranger Things 3? David Harbour says he's 'very killable'
• Snapchat redesign will introduce algorithmic feed, report says
• The Faroe Islands are on Google Street View thanks to some sheep
• Alexa switches on and decides to have a party so loud the police came
• It really sounds like this Christmas advert contains a NSFW insult to Paddington bear
• Chrissy Teigen swears she'll never use Twitter's new 280
• Another racist account gets verified on Twitter

• 8 Years Later: Does the GeForce GTX 580 Still Have Game in 2018?
• Staff Picks: Nicholson Baker, Alex Prager, Gary Panter
• A New Machine: Remembering Don Buchla
• The Book of Sediments
• Stop Preordering Video Games
• Flooded Penthouse
• “The Poker Game We Play”: A Letter from Christopher Isherwood
• The Quotable David Salle: Selections from ‘How to See’
• AMD Radeon RX 550 + Intel Pentium G4560
• Bare Shouldered Beauty: Suellen Rocca’s Art from the Sixties

• Waitin’ on the Student Debt Jubilee
• How a Book About Chinatown Made Me Remember My First New York Date
• Freedom to Fuck Up: An Interview with Merritt Tierce
• Having Trouble Sleeping? Read This.
• The Best Gaming Concept Art of 2016
• Three Fragments from ‘The Selected Prose of Franz Kafka’
• Banned Books Week: Snorri the Seal
• Flying Saucers Over the Art Dept.! How Book Designers Took on UFOs
• Best rope light deal: Save 25% on Lepro N1 AI Smart RGB LED Strip Lights
• Hilary Mantel: “The Internet Keeps Regurgitating You”