Could someone who knows more about birds than me please explain something.

If you were playing Top Trumps and you had to compare Buzzards and Crows, I think it would go like this.

Size Buzzard Wins
Talons Buzzard Wins
Flying Ability Buzzard Wins
Attitude Crow Wins

So with things apparently weighted in favour of the buzzard, why do you so often see buzzards being bullied by the bad mannered crow?

Buzzards get bullied by anything and everything, there are just more crows around than anything else. You see them getting duffed up by lapwings here – which is like getting bullied by someone shaking a flannel at you. Its a numbers thing – there are more crows than buzzards, and a motivation thing – the buzzard wants to eat the crow’s children – this emboldens the crows.

Saw a buzzard on a ride that had given up – just sitting on a rock a crow sat either side of him just giving him daggers.

And for toptrump – crows are much better flyers than buzzards, they’re better at flying than most birds.

….. they’re better at flying than most birds.

I’m not sure about that, crows don’t have particularly good manoeuvrability due to their fairly large wingspan. The huge advantage they have over other birds is their intelligence, they are scarily intelligent.

I dunno if I’d like to be a Buzzard. I mean the soaring around in the sky bit looks totally awesome, but you just know that as soon as you find a nice space with a good view to do a bit of wheeling and gliding, some crow’s going to turn up and give you some grief.

Personally, I’d score it:
Size – buzzard
Talons – buzzard
Flying ability – crow
Attitude – crow
Numerical adantage – crow
The buzzard has always seemed a sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing sort of bird to me. Essentially, they’re fancy carrion eaters, without the offensive skills of a proper hawk. I reckon most crows can spot this insecurity in a buzzard and like any playground bully will mercilessly exploit it.

Crows have a beak designed for pecking live prey and causing terminal damage, buzzards have a beak designed for tearing prey caught in their talons or more likely to be seen tearing rabbits that have been killed on the roads.

Buzzards are opertunists if they come across a fledgling or something unattended theyll have it, mind you ive seen jackdaws killing sparrow chicks before today

I’ve just seen two crows having a go at a cat in the work car park! I’m no cat fan but I felt obliged to intervene. What is going on, are the crows preparing to take on man?

Crows win on intelligence. They are amazingly clever. This is good:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrYPm6DD44M[/video]

But even better – there was a programme about I think it was animal intelligenge, a guy had a raven as a pet that he used to put in a cage when he went out, to avoid any mischief. He suspected something was going on so he set up a camera and some bait for the bird. When he was gone, it cleverly let himself out of the cage and ate the bait. But the most incredible thing is that he got back in the cage AND LOCKED THE DOOR behind him. Not only is that extremely intelligent for a bird anyway, but the raven was thinking about what the human would think, putting himself in his place. That’s incredible for any animal imo.