On The Downbeat - Crows on Canvas

For a few years now, I've been watching, photographing, feeding and enjoying the company of the crows on Southsea common with a view to committing them to canvas. These creatures have been built and tuned by evolution to scavenge. This gives them a brilliant set of skills; flexibility, adaptability, creativity, understanding, sociability, confidence and courage. They are well known to be one of the finest minds in the bird kingdom.

Often kept as pets, they have gregarious personalities. They can recognise individual humans and talk to each other about us. They tell each other who can be trusted, who brings food, or whether a person should be avoided. They stash food away, hiding it from their peers, for later. To me though, it's their character that I find the most interesting. The way they move. Those lithe, lightweight skeletons and musculature; the way it shifts inside their skin, and the control they have over the feathers. The precision and grace in flight so close to the ground - their bounciness! They're like flying cats, or monkeys, or racing cars, or some mad mix of everything. They're not dull though. And it's all of this that I want to try and catch on canvas if possible. The 'Reservoir Dogs' swagger, the bounce of 'Uptown Funk' and the black, broody menace of Sabbath. They're like John Coltrane, XTC, Sade* and Sleaford Mods all rolled into one.

(*yeah, but they are though).

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All birds have the advantage of a long history on the planet. Considerably longer than us. Their ancestry goes way back, thought to have begun in the Jurassic period, with the earliest birds derived from a class of theropoda dinosaurs named Paraves. Birds are categorized as a biological class, Aves. The earliest known is Archaeopteryx lithographica, from the Late Jurassic period, though Archaeopteryx is not commonly considered to have been a true bird. Modern phylogenies place birds in the dinosaur class Theropoda. According to the current consensus, Aves and a sister group, the order Crocodilia, together are the sole living members of an unranked "reptile" class, the Archosauria.

Phylogenetically, Aves is usually defined as all descendants of the most recent common ancestor of a specific modern bird species (such as the house sparrow, Passer domesticus), and either Archaeopteryx, or some prehistoric species closer to Neornithes (to avoid the problems caused by the unclear relationships of Archaeopteryx to other theropods). If the latter classification is used then the larger group is termed Avialae. Currently, the relationship between dinosaurs, Archaeopteryx, and modern birds is still under debate.

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