"You Eat A Peck Of Dirt Before You Die ....

.... and I know that a worm is just a fleshy tube filled up with soil but I still like to wash mine in a puddle before I eat it." said Mr Crow.

I got a pic of the crow above doing just that. I wonder if it is normal crow behaviour? I quite liked my pic of him with the worm in his beak and his reflection in the puddle but his eye wasn't visible and I think that's quite important for bird shots.

A peck is quite a lot of dirt, twelve pounds in fact. My granny and my parents used to send tomatoes to market in peck boxes. They were lined with tissue paper colour-coded for grade. Pink and white was the top grade, just the right size. Pinks were a bit too big and whites a bit too small. Blues were the discoloured and ugly ones - my favourites.

Doris Day used to sing, "I love you a bushel and a peck." Apples and oranges used to be marketed in returnable bushel boxes, four times the size of a peck. My sisters and I used to love looking at the exotic, individual, tissue, orange wrappers that we found in the boxes returned from market.