Jonny Phillips was walking his dog Arlo in a park near his Bournemouth home last Monday morning when Arlo scampered after a murder of crows circling a nearby tree.

‘He’s for ever chasing birds but never catches them – they always fly off,’ says Jonny, 32, a telecommunications manager. This time, however, one defiant crow landed on the grass.

‘I shouted at it to run away,’ says Jonny, but the bird did not heed his warning and Arlo picked it up. As the crow’s wings flapped between his surprised golden retriever-cross-staffie’s jaw, Jonny ran to separate them.

‘Luckily Arlo’s gentle-mouthed and well trained, so let the crow go,’ says Jonny. But as he was hunched over trying to put Arlo’s lead on, the cawing overhead suddenly grew deafening – the crows that had flown away were swooping back en masse.

‘I think there were five. They dive-bombed my head, grabbing my hair. I could feel definite claw and wing,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t say I was frightened, but I was shocked. It was nerve-racking. I’ve seen horror films where birds go for your eyes so I tried to cover mine.’

When the crows realised that their comrade was unharmed, they flew away.

We’re all familiar with the concept of gulls swiping chips at this time of year, but lately it seems other birds are exhibiting a similarly audacious sense of cunning – not to mention an increasingly volatile streak. Last June a spate of crow attacks were reported in Nottinghamshire after pensioner Jane Phillips warned that a bird swooped on her, leaving her with a bloodied head while she was walking on a footpath in Stapleford.

The same month, pupils at Dame Tipping Church of England primary school in the village of Havering-atte-Bower, Essex, were banned from playing outside after a buzzard was caught dive-bombing residents as they put out their bins. And last April, ‘lots of’ men in Flamstead, Herts, were left with ‘bleeding heads’ after being clawed from behind by a Harris’s hawk – a bird of prey kept privately in the UK – according to Roy Lambden, 68, the hawk’s first victim.

But if birds are getting more aggressive, we have only ourselves to blame, says Dr Robert Lambert, environmental historian at the University of Nottingham and vice-president of Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust.

‘The problem is human behaviour. We have created these opportunities and these conflicts,’ he adds. It comes as a result of chopping down hedgerows and woodlands, building new housing estates and ‘changing the face of the countryside so much that certain species are losing territory’.

He says they are ‘moving into suburban and urban areas’, and birds once granted their own space are now our neighbours. So we are fighting over the same land.

Meanwhile ‘we underestimate just how clever and adaptable some species have proved themselves to be’, he says, explaining what he means by opportunities.

‘They have attuned themselves to how wasteful we are with food, how frivolous with protecting our resources. They have become habituated to living alongside us and are learning how to profiteer.

‘Any good cafe on the coast of Britain has house sparrows living in it. The most important decision they’ve got to make in the morning is, do they want Bakewell slice or Victoria sponge?’

For the crow Rebecca Mullock encountered last month, the choice was between Quavers or barbecue-flavoured crisps after the plucky bird waltzed off with both.

Rebecca had visited her husband Dave, 52, at the golf course he manages in Paignton, Devon, at 9am one morning. She found him preparing the bouncy slide in the children’s play area, just a short walk from his office. Crucially, he had left his door open.

For the past few days, Dave had been feeding bird seed to a crow ‘because it had a bad foot and he felt sorry for it’, says Rebecca, and now they saw it pecking at what looked like human food on the grass. They thought little of it – until they arrived back at his office and Dave looked in his backpack, which he had left unzipped on the floor.

‘He said: “I know what that bird was eating – my lunch!”’ recalls Rebecca, 34. His two packets of crisps were missing. ‘Dave was gutted. He loves crisps.’

Determined to nail her suspect, Rebecca looked at CCTV footage of the half hour the office had been left unattended.

She watched in disbelief as the crow appeared at the door, looked furtively from side to side to check the coast was clear, plodded over to Dave’s backpack, ignored a healthier bunch of bananas on a nearby chair, jumped on to the bag, grabbed both packets of crisps between its beak and sauntered out.

‘He didn’t even seem like he was in a hurry,’ says Rebecca. ‘Dave couldn’t believe how brazen he was. He stopped feeding the crow after that, he was so annoyed.’

Of course, deliberately feeding ducks and geese is ‘a national obsession’ that goes back to the Victorian era, with the bird food market alone worth £250million a year. Dr Lambert stresses that leftovers are not good for them: ‘Bread clogs them up. It also makes them more aggressive among themselves because they’re competing over a resource.’

So much so that visitors to country estate Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire are now greeted with a sign asking them not to feed the ducks because they are ‘becoming very demanding and starting to show anti-social behaviour’, while one picnicker reported having their melon stolen by a pheasant there last month.

For many birds, life is easier in urban areas. ‘Cities are warmer. There’s less predation [fewer predators].’

But the thrum of traffic and factories is changing their behaviour. ‘Song birds like robins are getting louder and more shirty and grumpy because they are suffering from light and noise pollution,’ explains Dr Lambert. ‘They’re having to sing louder because our urban environments are noisy and that is raising their stress levels.’

Conservation efforts have also reintroduced some historical conflict between humans and birds. Red kites, which Dr Lambert describes as ‘a massive nuisance in early modern cities’ were almost extinct by the 1940s. But breeding programmes have helped the population soar to over 10,000 ‘and we’re getting annoyed with them again’, he says. ‘People don’t like the menacing image of them above their gardens. There’s an irritation index that’s rising.’

Geof Haigh, 72, recalled a red kite snatching bread and hummus from his hand last April as he sat on a bench in his garden in Goring, Oxon. As it swooped, the feathers of its wings brushed his wife Gail’s face. ‘It wasn’t painful, but it was surprising – it was like a feather duster,’ said Geof, who was left with a scratch on his hand and said it was the third time in five years a kite had taken food from him while eating al fresco. ‘Why he wanted bread and hummus, I could not imagine.’

Another big conservation success story is buzzards, a bird of prey nearly extinct in some areas of the UK by the middle of the 20th century but which have now spread across the country – as Charlotte Louise has discovered to her detriment, having spent £750 on hypnotherapy to overcome her terror of the birds. ‘I’m still not a fan, but it worked,’ she says, ‘My fear isn’t as bad now.’

Charlotte, 39, was jogging down a country road one summer morning four years ago when she felt a swoosh above her head. ‘I thought “what the hell was that?” ’ recalls Charlotte, who owns a hair removal business. She looked upwards to see ‘a big, brown bird with massive wings’ just centimetres above her head.

There had been reported sightings of buzzards near her home in Market Drayton, Shropshire. One runner had his head scratched by one of the birds; another fell over and broke his collarbone.

‘I thought it was going to attack me. I was so scared,’ says Charlotte of her ordeal. She fled, her Strava running app data revealing the extent to which she ‘legged it’.

Over the following months, she saw more buzzards, which breed at this time of year and are most likely to be protective of their young in early summer.

One swooped in front of her former partner; another stopped whenever she did to encourage it to fly past.

‘Another time, when I was walking across a field, a buzzard started circling around my head, getting closer and closer. I could see its face, its beady little eyes. I was absolutely terrified.

‘I knew on one level they weren’t really after me, that they just didn’t want me to disturb their nest, but my brain got irrational.’

Charlotte changed her running route to steer clear of the wooded areas where buzzards nested. But two years ago she started training for a marathon ‘and I knew I couldn’t keep running in the same tiny loop’.

‘The hypnotherapist managed to erase my memories of seeing buzzards and reframe what would happen next time I saw one,’ says Charlotte, who had ten sessions and says the cost was worth it. ‘I don’t go into flight-or-fight mode when I see them now.’

For production manager Sarah Reis, 47, the feathered menace was a swan. Walking along a canal on her way to work in Exeter, she came across a large bird in the middle of the towpath.

‘Every time I got closer it aggressively opened his wings, hissed and came towards me,’ she says. ‘I had to call my boss and say: “I’m really sorry, I’m going to be late, a swan won’t let me pass.”

‘They thought it was hilarious. But I was petrified. I thought it could either bite me or its wings would knock me into the river, making me even later to work – and wet.’

The swans’ cygnets were on the other side of the lock, says Sarah, and it was clearly trying to protect them. Local kayakers reported much hissing too.

After ten minutes, she gave up trying to get by. ‘I walked two miles back to the main road and took the bus to work instead. I was 90 minutes late.’ A spokesperson for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds says: ‘Aggression can often be caused when birds feel threatened or are protecting their young.

‘When faced with a bird showing aggressive behaviour the best thing is to give them space, avoid the immediate area and even take an alternative route.’

Birds rarely hurt people, stresses Dr Lambert, but they are more likely to see us as a threat if we are with a dog. ‘They identify dogs as predators. It’s wired into their DNA that a dog-like animal is a wolf or a fox.’

Sarah Veness’s car was the catalyst for her altercation. In the summer of 2024 she was visiting a stately home in Suffolk when she opened the passenger door and realised she had accidentally ‘whacked it into a peacock’, says Sarah, 50, a mum of two.

Concerned that she had hurt the bird, which she glimpsed edging round the car door, she was just getting out to check when she felt a pain in her leg. The peacock had ‘lunged’ for her.

‘It jabbed its head at me and bit my right thigh as I got out of the car,’ recalls Sarah, a publisher, who looked down to see her cotton trousers torn and blood seeping through. ‘It hurt and I was shocked. The peacock ran away and flew on to a wall, and sat there, watching me. Luckily, it seemed fine.’

She asked the gift shop reception for a first aid kit. ‘I could see the skin was pierced and thought I should clean it – I didn’t know how hygienic peacocks were,’ says Sarah. ‘I think the staff were worried I’d kick up a fuss, but it was entirely my fault. The peacock was acting in self-defence.’

Mopping up the blood in the bathroom she found two cuts around 1cm-long.

Sarah put the incident to the back of her mind until a few weeks later when she came out of her office building on another country estate a 45-minute drive away to find a peacock sitting on the roof of her car. It refused to budge when she waved her keys at it or when she opened her car door.

‘Eventually I managed to shoo it away,’ she says, ‘but I became convinced word had spread among the peacock community that I had assaulted one of their friends.’

As for Jonny? The crows have kept away since his adventure with Arlo. ‘But my wife has reminded me that crows never forget,’ he says. ‘I’m definitely more aware of them now.’