There are so many things to love about this article, about a crow attacking female joggers in Eltham park, from the front page of South-East London's fine local gazette, The News Shopper (a title which conjures up the image of some Chris Morris-esque anchor, trawling the aisles of a supermarket, stacking up his trolley, and finally bringing to the check-out his bounty of news stories). There is the caption beneath the (above) photo which reads "menacing" in inverted commas, there is the official advice for runners to wear hard hats, there is the image of park wardens crowding round a tree making bird noises (a tactic yet to succeed), there is the sidebar entitled "When crows go bad". But best of all for Hitchcock fans is the little tease that the avian attacker has "an eye for blond females." Tim Webb from the RSPCA is brought in to explain that crows have a very long memory, suggesting that “At some point in the past this crow may have had a bad experience with a blonde female.” (Haven't we all, you might say.) So, like all good movie psychos, the bird had a damaged childhood, the attacks are merely the result of some barely repressed trauma ...
