Raven with Purple Sneakers. Matthew Yellowman, artist. A gift from Becky, received yesterday.
The world goes on regardless. They call me back into it. Seven years ago they called me back, their song not meant for me but I took it anyway, walking with the dog in a blur of loss and I heard them, atonal and grating from the power lines.
“We are here,” they sang.
I don’t know if I have ever seen the same raven twice. Two of them in the tree outside this window yesterday, probing the pollarded plane for insects. One against a field of blue as I walked. They are a pestilence in the desert, flock there by the tens of thousands disturbing the wildlife. So we’ve got that in common too. Ten years ago Sharon and I drove past an afternoon congregation of them, a thousand of them merrily dissecting a vacant lot outside a small Mojave town. “It looks like they’re waiting for a Who concert,” she said. “Counting Crows” I replied, earning a Look. Ravens follow humans and their edible garbage deeper and deeper into the Mojave each year, and many of them supplement their steady diet of cheese-coated fast food wrapping paper with an occasional baby tortoise.
I enjoy seeing ravens in the desert but it is more and a guilty pleasure, much as is seeing myself in the desert. Hitchcock’s nightmare comes true but it is not the revenge of the wild: the profusion of ravens rather one more aspect of the injury we do to the wild.
We walked this weekend on Bodega Head, after we took the dog’s old things to the shelter for donation, and along the clifftops we talked of whether Zeke would have enjoyed being there with us, where vertiginous trail met cliff crumbling toward the ocean. I stood at the edge, watched splayed blue-black wings shining off against a flawless sky, heading out to sea. The Birds was mainly filmed in Bodega, and the old church is still there and the old school. The movie didn’t end the way the filmmaker had intended: there was no budget to cover the Golden Gate Bridge in brooding ravens, his vision of an emphatic wild arisen to assert itself again. We are here.
The ravens - or crows; I can’t tell the difference - around here know I put peanuts out for the squirrels. They start to call when they see me come out in the morning with the bag, and wait in the trees until they’re reasonably sure I’m inside for good before they move down to the porch rail.
I put the nuts under a patio footstool so they can’t just fly down and grab them. That gives the squirrels more chance to get the larger share. The crows are nervous about having to walk under furniture: they sidestep, hesitate, sidestep… then grab a peanut and walk away strutting, self-pleased.
I used to try to shoo the crows off - yelled, sprayed water at them, etc. - because those nuts aren’t for them, dammit. I like crows, but in the abstract more than practice when they’re filching food meant for someone else. Then it occurred to me that, well, crows get hungry, too; and heaven knows ‘my’ squirrels have gotten chubby. So I sigh and let them all be.
Now, if I could just get the crows to stop shitting on my car…
Differences between ravens and crows:
Ravens are larger than crows, which are smaller than ravens.
Crows have fan-shaped tails. Raven tails are longer and wedge-shaped.
Crows caw. Ravens’ croaks sound like the birds are trying to caw with a bad cold and a mouth full of water.
Crows’ wings spread to about two and a half feet and are blunt-tipped. Ravens get up to four-foot in wingspread, with pointed tips.
Ravens soar. Crows cannot.
Ravens make “whoosh” sounds when they flap their wings. Crows mostly do not.
Ravens have shaggy “manes” of feathers on the napes of their necks. Crows generally do not unless it’s very windy.
Ravens have curved bills with “hairy” feathers at the point where bill meets forehead. Crows have straight bills with no such feathers.
I am currently <strike>cooling</strike> warming my heels in a bit of surburban Australia, the treed parts of which seem fairly overrun with Australian Ravens. Their ubiquitous otherwordly vocalizations (you can listen here - croaks (?), I guess) are quite effective at giving a Hitchcockian apocalyptic feel to the place.
For comparison, here is the croak of the holarctic Common Raven, Corvus corax.
at least from my VHPOV
(? very humble point of view ;-))
Ravens ... from afar you might mistake them for eagles.
Crows ... surely not
Coincidentally, I just finished reading Heinrich’s Mind of the Raven.
One of the more fascinating insights he offers is that ravens are “wolf-birds” - they evolved as companions to wolf-packs - and that they are also “human-birds” in much the same way.
It has been a long time since I’ve seen a raven. The land is too domesticated here.
(It’s been a long time since I’ve heard or seen a frog, either. *sigh* No wonder this place depresses me.)
that is a wonderful sculpture, great gift.
Awhile back I read a story about ravens ‘stealing’ windshield wipers from the cars of school teachers in a rural area. Every single car in the parking lot was targeted. The teachers didn’t know who the culprit was until one day the school principal happened to look out his window and spot a raven prying one loose.
Wanda and Billy Keay (nature photographers) took this photo of a grizzly chasing a raven that had stolen his salmon catch. (The jpg doesn’t do it justice.)