A bombing raid on a woman in Mansfield Road

IT sounds like one of the nightmare scenes in The Birds, a big blur of black feathers dive-bombing onto women’s heads, swooping again and again until the victim runs away screaming.

And after several incidents in Gospel Oak in recent weeks, it was said the suspected crow behind the attacks has even drawn blood on one occasion.

So frequent are the bombing raids, in fact, one resident said they walk down Mansfield Road with the protection of an umbrella.

Far from following the script of Hitchcock’s movie – originally a thriller penned by Daphne du Maurier – wildlife experts say the bird is not leading a fight to the death against humans, but simply trying to protect a nest.

The resident with umbrella, who didn’t want to be named, told the New Journal: “Our neighbourhood WhatsApp group exploded. It’s really weird. My daughter has been attacked twice. My neighbour had her cheek scratched. We called Camden Council but they said there’s nothing they could do because crows aren’t pests.”

Jiyan Demirkol, manager of the Hope Food and Wine Shop in Mansfield Road, said: “We’re hearing about 20 attacks in a day. One lady came into the shop and said it attacked her three times in one day.”

A crow about to bomb down on a woman in Gospel Oak

Owner Cengiz Taskin added: “One lady got attacked in the morning on her way to work and then she got attacked again when she was coming home. She came into the shop, she was so scared. One of them was bleeding from the attack. “It attacks them from behind but if you turn around and face it the crow will fly away.”

Bizarrely, the crow seems to only attack people with long hair, they said.

Jiyan Demirkol, manager of the Hope Food and Wine Shop in Mansfield Road

Tom Stewart of the British Trust for Ornithology said after watching a video of the Mansfield Road crow hitting a woman on the head: “It looks like a carrion crow. It’s quite a big bird; I can imagine that being quite scary.”

“The crow is likely to be nesting along that stretch of road and it’s likely to have young in the nest. That’s the only thing I can think would make a crow act aggressively toward humans.”

He added: “Crows, like all birds, are scared of people, so it’s defending its young rather than attacking people. We know crows are highly intelligent, although not clever enough in this instance to realise that these people aren’t attacking their young. “But that bird will be hyper aware because it’s got young in the nest at the moment.”

He added: “Women with long hair I’m less clear about. Maybe the colour or the way light falls on the hair makes the crow alarmed.

“The crow could perceive the hair to be another bird.”

He said once the young fledge over the next few weeks it will stop defending its nest.

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