This footage shows a sneaky crow hiding a shiny key belonging to a kind theme park worker who fed it daily in a notepad before nicking it and flying away.
Other footage then shows the hapless employee chasing after it.
Zafer Uysal, who works at the ParkFuntastic bicycle park in the municipality of Kepez, which is located in Greater Antalya, in Antalya Province, started to feed the crows in a nearby forest some time ago.
But one of the crows that he had been feeding on a regular basis popped by and lingered for a while on the morning of Thursday, 17th February.
As can be seen in the footage, the crow at first hid the worker’s key inside a notebook that was on a table outside before surreptitiously snapping it up in its beak and taking off.
Uysal said that the crow landed on a pine tree some 20 metres away, deciding to leave the key there.
Uysal and his colleagues, who have not been named, therefore decided to climb the tree with the help of a ladder in a bid to retrieve the valuable and shiny metal key.
The incident was caught on the theme park’s CCTV cameras and as well as showing the thief stealing the key, it also shows a hapless Uysal desperately running after it to catch it.
Explaining how it all went down, Uysal said: “I came to work in the morning, first we took our vehicles out.
“I left the key on the table. The crow has come before. The crow we feed ourselves. It’s come this far. I thought his wing was broken.
“He got on top of the car. We were feeding it. These crows usually carry shiny objects to their nests to impress their mates.
“I closed the windows thinking that he would come in earlier. The keys were lying outside on the side.
“It occurred to me that he would take the keys; I ran but couldn’t catch up. When I looked, the crow was taking the key away.”
He added: “I ran after him, he flew and I flew. I chased. He landed on the top of the tree, and the female came to him and played with the key.
“We made them fly away by throwing pinecones at them.
“After an hour, we retrieved the key using a ladder. They are still here now. We continue to feed them. He greets me when we arrive in the morning. Now we hide the key inside. We bought a white plastic container.”
It is currently unclear if the crow managed to secure another piece of choice bling to impress its mate.
Corvids, especially magpies, but sometimes crows too, reportedly steal shiny objects and take them to their nests. But scientists who have looked into this on many occasions have reportedly never found empirical evidence supporting what appears to be a myth steeped in folklore.
