"Turn east, then travel three miles as the crow flies...". How often have you heard that expression? Where does the idea of crows travelling in direct, uninterrupted flight lines, the shortest route between A and B - come from? Most crows that I've watched seem to be pretty easily diverted from the straight and narrow by anything that looks like it might be edible, like these two that were waiting to swoop on discarded chips on the seafront at Sunderland this afternoon...... so maybe that's where the expression comes from - their tendency to head straight as straight as an arrow for the nearest food supply. According to one web reference the earliest use of the idiom 'as the crow flies' dates only from 1767.
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