Mystery Solved?

I have given considerable thought to the identity of yesterday's mystery bird, and come to the rather boring conclusion that it was a juvenile blackbird which was, for some reason, trying to persuade me to feed it. The head bobbing is, of course, typical of begging behaviour; the noise I don't know because I've never consciously heard blackbirds begging before. The size and shape are about right, and the colouring as well, probably, bearing in mind that I was quite deep in the woods in the valley. Mystery solved, I think.

I took Ty down to the creek this morning and watched young crows being given a feeding lesson, stomping about in the mud and seaweed and occasionally begging for bits. There is an adult crow I see quite often down there who dunks his food in the stream before eating, and I wonder whether this sort of behaviour is learned by individuals or passed on by example from parents to young. I'm sure not all crows do this.

I wasn't aware of hacking my way through undergrowth, but when I got home I discovered that the front of my coat (one of those woolly lined flannelette 'lumberjack' shirts that used to be so popular before the invention of fleeces) was covered in hundreds of round brown seeds, not so much sticky as clingy. Not sure what they had come from, but the dog didn't have any so it was obviously something quite high growing. I'll look out for them tomorrow and see if I can identify the plant.