"Yes please!" Pinion answered, pacing a little in its restlessness to hear something new and exciting. "This cage gets so boring, I'd very much like to see what you can do."

"Very well," the crow said, and approached a small area of bushes that gave the human feeding station its border. A snail sat on one of the leaves and the crow pecked it. "Do you see this?" it asked Pinion.

Pinion nodded.

"Crows eat snails, but when we do they hide in their shells." It paused and Pinion tried to think about how to solve the problem.

"Do you push a stone inside to force it out?" it offered.

The crow chuckled. "Like the human-drink? No, flamingo! I do this instead." With that it ripped the snail off of its leaf and took off, its wings sending a small flurry of dust and leaves in its wake. Its destination seemed to be straight up.

Pinion watched it. The crow flew higher than the fence, maybe twice as high. Inspired by the sight of a flying bird Pinion half-opened its wings.

And then the crow dropped the snail.

Pinion watched it fall and bounce off the ground, then looked sympathetically up at the crow who was just coming in to land. "Oh dear," Pinion comforted the crow, not wanting to embarrass it. "Maybe if you try again..."

The crow turned the snail over and thoughtfully examined it. "Once more," it muttered, picked the tiny creature up again and lifted itself into the air. Once more Pinion watched as it got higher and higher in the sky - and then the unbelievable happened: it dropped it again! Pinion couldn't believe that the crow was so clumsy! The crow began to float down on its broad, black wings even before the snail had finished falling. The snail clinked against the ground and bounced away. The crow landed and hopped over to where the snail had come to rest, carelessly folding its wings as it went.

For a moment Pinion watched awkwardly, unsure of what it could say to diffuse the situation. Whatever the crow had wanted to show it, it had clearly failed.

"And there we go!" the crow announced in triumph. It used its feet to keep the snail's shell in place and yanked the creature free. The crow tossed the snail's innards back and swallowed them. "And that," it told Pinion with a bright look in its eyes, "is how you eat a snail!"

"You..." Pinion looked up, then at the ground, and then at the snail. "...you broke its shell, didn't you?" it asked, realisation dawning. "With force. That's how you did it!"

The two birds burst into laughter, not with hilarity but with delight at this ingenious way of getting food! For Pinion's part the demonstration was all the more delightful because this had been an example of the crow eating wild food. The crows may have taken advantage of human wastefulness but they clearly didn't have to! This line of thought made Pinion speak again as their laughter died down.

"What's the world like? Away from the cages, I mean."

And so the crow told it. It talked about the openness and the dirty smell of the humans and the many, many marks they had made on the world. It talked about things called cars that acted like cattle but showed no signs of life. Pinion had to ask what cattle were and didn't really understand the crow's reply, but made impressed-sounding noises anyway because it wanted the descriptions to keep coming. The crow talked about long expanses of water called rivers, and high hills barren of human settlement where the plants took over and animals thrived.

By the time their conversation came to a stop night had fallen. The two went pensively quiet, looking at each other through the gloom.

Pinion looked around at its cage. The cage looked even smaller than usual now that it had the crow's stories in mind. It had just one question to ask of the clever crow.

There's only one option here but it's not a scary one, I promise. Here it is: