I went to the cinema to see Avatar:Fire and Ash today. The film was entertaining in the same wat the other two have been, although I could do without the bladder-straining three-hour-plus running time, and the 4k high-framerate visuals in the screening I attended at times made it look like a videogame cutscene.
The cinema I visited was The Arc in Rotherham. After the film ended I went for a short walk around the area to try and finish a partly used roll of film I had in my Olympus Trip. The light was lovely and I hopefully got some nice pictures (although it’s an expired roll of slide film, so we’ll have to wait and see…).
However, one thing I wasn’t expecting to see was an altercation between a rat and a crow!
I fully understand that there are rats lurking in busy town centres – us messy humans give them a ready supply of food and shelter – but it’s quite unusual to witness them on the pavement, especially on a bright afternoon. What is even more unusual is to see them in some sort of life-and-death struggle with a crow! As I approached the scene, I saw the rat being harrassed by the bird, which kept grabbing its tail in its beak and pulling it backwards towards the road. When a passerby approached the crow would hop or fly out of the vicinity until it felt safe to return and resume it’s actions.
The rat was alive, but was moving slowly with a limp, perhaps due to the crow’s attacks, or maybe some previous injury, and there was no place for it to flee apart from beneath a car parked on the pavement, but I’m pretty certain the crow would have gotten under there without trouble. I felt bad for the rat and wondered if I should attempt a rescue, but I had nothing to grab it with and didn’t fancy getting bitten and contracting some nasty disease, so I decided against it.
Crows are intelligent creatures and I had a distinct sense that it was attempting to pull the injured rat to the road where it would be run over and thus provide a tasty meal. Or maybe it thought the rat’s tail was a juicy worm?
It was a fascinating, yet horrible thing to witness.
The picture below is of Rotherham railway station which is across the road from where it all occurred.
Minolta X-300 & Minolta 50mm f/1.7 MD on Ilford Type-517. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 14.5mins @ 20°.
Taken on 25 October 2025
Steel City Snapper photography 
I can’t stand HFR. It (and digital projection in general) has ruined cinema. Films should be, well, film, and they should always be projected at 24 frames per second. Even digital animation looked and felt way better as film prints. The switch to digital projection ended the magic of the theater experience.
Movies over three hours long should have an intermission.
What a bizarre animal battle to witness in broad daylight… Good call on not trying to help the rat. They carry all kinds of nasty stuff. I don’t have much use for either rats or crows. I think just letting nature decide the outcome of that skirmish was the right call.
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It’s been a long time since I last saw a movie with an intermission – possibly The Towering Inferno back when I was a kid in the 70s!
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Yeah, same — I honestly can’t even remember the last movie I watched in a theater with an intermission. The studios are undoubtedly trying to maximize the number of showtimes per film in order to maximize profits. What they fail to realize, however, is that when movies are that long a lot of people just simply aren’t going to (or can’t) sit through them without a break, myself included. So they’re actually losing a lot of money, because none of those people are buying tickets. It’s pretty dumb, like almost everything the studios do these days…
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Crows are very smart, indeed! I have seen them walk in crosswalks when the lights are in their favor – really funny to watch. They are also known to be nice to people who are nice to them, and other great things. I saw a very old video of an eagle or other large raptor pick up a mountain goat on a ledge and drop it to kill it for food. Seems to me that one less rat in the world is nothing to complain about (yeah, I’m prejudiced).
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Nature really is red in tooth and claw a lot of the time, isn’t it? We humans are very good at athropomorphising our fellow creatures and then getting injured by them while they’re in a frightened or hostile state. Or, perhaps worse, attempting to help and making the situation worse when it turns out they’re not actually characters from a Disney movie. 🙂
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Completely agreed. My definition of “civilization” has within it the idea we can restrain our tooth and claw – though these days I wonder.
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