For the Birds

Ravens--not a whole lot about them in books, mostly about their symbolic journey through mankind's tedious history and good old Edgar's infatuation. Nothing much about the bird itself except it is a bigger and smarter version of its cousin the crow. But the raven has inhabited my part of the forest for as long as I can remember. One pair has nested in the white pines year after year, populating the Valley. the male is large and strong; the female more slender with a missing feather in one wing so you can recognize her when she is in flight. Both are not afraid of us two legged neighbors.

This year I have been more attentive to the pair--they've nested in a towering white pine that stands alone by a pump up the road. Larry has been feeding them all winter in my backyard. They've come to expect it even when I appeared--twice a day they screech outside my window--twice a day I comply with stale rolls or bread. They have two or three babies that hatched late March. When I arrived, they are healthy and loud demanding their parents to feed them and won't let up until the parents either bring some food or screech one high pitched warning, I guess, to shut up that there is danger nearby. Only then do they quiet.

The comings and going of the parents, whom I call Notch and Beauty, is marked only by the babies screeching and the familiar whoosh whoosh of their wings as they displace the air. Something I have been noticing about the pair. When either approaches the rolls I toss out, oh, and they sure know when I do because they appear from nowhere almost instantly, they land only one at a time. When one does, it hopss sideways toward the food, rubbing its beak on the ground one way and then another, stopping, and repeating. The female does it three or four times, then takes the food and leaves. The male goes through a much more dramatic ritual. All the other creatures do not go near him nor do they cross the "lines" he makes in the pine needles surrounding the food he plans to take. Quite a process. Then, he takes as much of the bread or rolls as he can. He stacks them, and either opens his beak wide to take the stack, or else stabs them onto his beak. Sometimes he has so much that he cannot take off and has to start the process all over again. Sometimes he makes it like a heavy payloader. Amazing.

I will talk about the babies in flight, well, their process of learning flight next entry. I'm enjoying these characters. They certainly are smart.