Nest rustlings?

Brooding

Previous nest

For the past few days, Mother Sunshine has been coming out (of the nest). Could this mean some eggs are beginning to hatch? Although the nest is barely visible to me, I did watch some of the building of it and was interested in Grog and Sunshine's use of recyclable nest lining, ie. discarded paper amongst other bits. In the chillier Maine woods of Bernd Heinrich's ravens, their nests are lined with cozy deer fur.

If any young ravens have hatched, Sunshine will still brood them as they cannot control their body temperature yet, having no feathers. Their eyes are still closed and their pink bodies are only pinfeathered, ie. not yet plumed. Their bills are white-edged and they sleep most of the time except when fed.

Although their eyes (which will open blue, changing eventually to deep brown) are closed, the nestlings will hear a myriad of birdsong rising from the bush beneath them--the thrasher's complex lovely phrasing, the plaintive mew of the gnatcatcher, the shrill call of the quail, the seek, seeking of the black phoebe punctuated by the chee chee of Ana's hummingbird. Against the crash of the waves comes the clackity clack of the roadrunner, not to mention the crow's insistent caw. Along with the important parental voices, all these different signaling sounds start the raven off well, a bird known for its mimicry.

Besides the neighboring Cooper's hawks and their high kucking cries, crows are harassing the ravens more these days as they, too, are nesting. Ravens often fly low, searching for food while the crows dive bomb them from above. I have watched in amazement as Grog flips over to show the crow or hawk his feet and bill and then easily rights himself, all while still flying, a lesson he will teach his offspring in the coming months. 

Black Bird Bias

A Songbird, a raven

(click on photo to see clearly)

There seems to be a prejudice out there against corvids, that these songbirds kill the smaller songbirds in gardens. Corvids do eat young birds but cats kill more. A professor at Cornell, Kevin McGowan, has a theory he calls 'compensatory mortality' which states that if one predator doesn't kill the songbird's young, another will. Most young birds die in their first year through one cause or another. The greater threat to garden bird numbers though is human encroachment into their habitats, all of our building, our pesticides and consequent climate change are the greater evil.

These black corvids are wild, also struggling to survive. Hawks, coyotes, snakes take their young. Corvids have a history of human persecution. They were associated with the black death and the plague in medieval times. They were hated and hunted but they have adapted. They are survivors. They eat the roadkill and the garbage we leave behind.

As spelled out so thoroughly in Marzluff and Angell's In the Company of Crows and Ravens, the interaction between man and corvids goes back to the cave dwellers who carved their images on the walls of their caves. Genetic evidence makes a case for ravens having been in North America for over four million years, well before humans. The authors believe the most important interaction between men and ravens was when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers.

When Siberian hunter-gatherers crossed the land bridge to North America ten thousands of years ago, the clever raven joined with him, perhaps leading the hunter to the kill and then taking some share of the booty. The authors suggest that it was the larger corvids who flew the Bering Land Bridge from Asia, leading the smaller songbirds to the Americas.

With the onset of agrarian society, crows adapted to the conversion of forests to fields better than ravens. Of course, the crows ate much of the corn and became an infamous pest to be hunted and annihilated. In the thirties and forties, some states particularly in the midwest, designated crows as vermin and dynamited crow roosts, killing hundreds of thousands. Even today, they are still hunted for fun or sport. Likewise in Europe, ravens were persecuted for centuries and are rare.

Ravens are known for their interaction with wolves and are sometimes called wolf-birds. With the re-introduction of wolves into Yellowstone, the ravens are back with the wolves in what appears to be a symbiotic relationship, a raven calling the wolf's attention to prey, the wolf doing the killing for both. As mentioned above, early man had a similar relationship with the ravens as wolves do. In many native American cultures, corvids are held highly, worshipped as sacred whereas the Euro-American culture made their black image negative, one of death and destruction.

Like most people, I also love the smaller songbirds. In my tiny garden, I follow the wren, the hummingbird, the finch and the yellow throat, different warblers. If I see a nest search going on, I try to scare off the bigger hungry relatives. Yet, it is all nature, their interference and mine. According to the poet, Wallace Stevens, there are at least "Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird." Like him, "I know the blackbird is involved in what I know."

A Darkling Duet

It might be a surprise to some to know that ravens, and crows for that matter, are officially songbirds. They, corvids, belong to the order of perching birds (Passeriformes) and the suborder, true songbird (oscines) along with about half of the bird species. The oscines, unlike owls for instance, do not have an innate language of song; they have to be taught by their parents, just like humans, dolphins and whales.

Understanding that fact, explains the very different sounds Grog and Sunshine sometimes make. (You might recall that Grog was brought up in the old country, across the pond as they say.*) Sunshine seems to favor click-like sounds and I have heard more of the same in the local hills where I sometimes walk. Recently, eight ravens sitting on a row of posts produced a musical roundelay of clicking sounds, each responding to the other. It reminded me of the Xhosa language with its clicks. There didn't seem to be any apparent reason for their chorus other than a spontaneous joining in song.

When I first was getting to know Grog, at the end of my run as I was leaving the beach, he would fly over with an aaaarkh, what I took to be farewell, and circled back to his territory. For the most part, raven sounds are for communication. Like humans, ravens accentuate their voice with body language, raised feathers being one of their more common means of expression. Their emotions are apparent in the harsh, loud cry to alert to danger, or a hard repetitive quork to show displeasure, particularly with their young.

Young ravens with their much higher voice, beg loudly in demand for food but also spend hours gurgling, quorking, trilling, clicking, practicing it seems a plethora of sounds. They are learning their language. At the other extreme of the frightful sounds are the sweet and soft murmurings of a raven with its mate. I have been lucky to hear Grog and Sunshine sing together and respond in what seemed like a point, counterpoint. In between the dulcet and the gruff raven sounds, there are something like eighty different calls recorded according to the raven expert, Bernd Heinrich. 

Most people will find the morning corvid calls, the crow's caw, the raven's kaaark, annoying. It's a far cry from the golden scales of the house finch's dawn lilt. I have never heard a nightingale sing but I have read Keat's ode.  Like him, to "darkling, I listen," but to a different darkling and I listen now again.

*See Meet the Grogs again post

To see or not to see

White-necked Ravens up Kilimanjaro

It's with great consternation that I didn't see these ravens with much interest. I think they were around the 16,000 feet level and I was probably more interested in pulling out another breath. Nevertheless, my fascination with corvids came later. Will it always be the case that my interest soars once something is no longer available such as the exotic and diverse African birdlife like these ravens, Corvus albicollis? Yet maybe the ravens were beginning to work on my unconscious.

Which brings me to Grog in the fog. This morning, despite the fog, Grog found me on the beach while Sunshine was stuck in the nest. As he was standing on the sand, he pushed his neck backward until his head touched his back, a contortion necessary to inspect the heavens. He did not turn his head around like the ravens in the above photo but pulled it straight back. Of course, with no blue visible, I thought he was checking the fog for any passing trouble. Grog returned to his normal posture with his head in place before a crow flew over. He didn't give it a passing glance.

When he threw back his head again with his beak pointed straight up, I thought perhaps there were insects in the moist air worth his catching even though I couldn't see them. Once again, Grog returned to himself and uttered notes soft as the mist. The third time he craned his neck skywards with his beak a bit open, it was as if to drink the moist air. I thought maybe he really was thirsty. Then when we moved on, he did stop at a rivulet for a drink. What was he doing with these contortions? Perhaps Grog was trying the view from below, from my perspective rather than from his usual heights. 

As Bernd Heinrich noted, raven vision is excellent. He followed a raven with his binoculars who had been near him as it raced off to harass an eagle about two miles away. All Heinrich had been able to see at first was a dot in the horizon. Like all birds, ravens have binocular and monocular vision, ie. they can focus both eyes like us but they can also use each eye separately. Marzluff and Angell in their comprehensive book, In the Company of Crows and Ravens, note how corvids can rest one eye while keeping the other vigilant. They discovered that the corvids on either end of a line roosting for the night can rest their inner eye while keeping the outer eye on guard.

Cache and carry

All corvids cache or hide things. Ravens cache some food for later. The raven's expandable throat is the perfect carrier for their treats. Caching requires  a good memory, a spatial awareness. They also are clever or one might say, devious in their caching. I have seen Grog burying some food in the sand, marking it carefully with a stick or broken shell while Sunshine looked on. When he flew off, she went to the exact spot, turned over the sand and nothing was there. Almost invariably, there is a double cache.

I guess theft is common but the ravens definitely have the seagulls licked. One day I saw Grog casually walk up to a seagull who had just caught a fish in the surf. Grog took the fish right from the shocked seagull's mouth and walked away with it. After eating some, he flew with a full throat pouch to the cliffs to cache. The fish might have ended up in the palm trees. There are some near Grog and Sunshine's nest and the pair seem to find the base of the palm leaves, where they attach to the stem, much to their liking for a hiding or an apparent hiding place.

Ravens learn early to be aware of other vigilant eyes and to anticipate their fellow cachers. Perhaps they take pleasure in tricking each other or just keeping the other on his claws as it were. I have watched young ravens practicing caching with debris on the beach. The watchful eyes of their fellow fledglings make for a perfect school. Of course, they first learn by watching their parents even though to 'cache and carry' seems almost innate.

Esther Woolfson, in her elegantly written and deeply felt book, Corvus, describes her resident rook, Chicken's, caching behavior as not just natural but artistic and obsessive. She tells us that if the food is a particular favorite of Chicken's, (in this case she mentioned goat cheese) she will wrap it first in paper, unwrap it, wrap it again, cache it, retrieve it and cache it again, enjoying it obsessively throughout the day, tasting it bit by bit. Chicken's piece de resistance for caching is her excavation, inch by inch, over the years of part of the author's kitchen wall above the skirting board.

I haven't been able to detect quite such artistry from my wild raven friends unless the chiseling with their beaks into the cliffside to cache is the beginning of a monumental sculpture. The act of saving--an art, I wonder?

Meet the Grogs again

I thought I might go back and explain how I named the Grogs to make them more memorable. To the left is Sunshine Winger-Grog and above is Arthur Conan Grog, Esq. Not long after I had started noticing these ravens, I read an article in the Los Angeles Times about the ravens at the Tower of London and one that escaped.  "A raven called Grog, the Tower's notes say, "was last seen outside an East End pub called the Rose and Punchbowl."

What kind of amazing raven could escape the Tower? I mean, think of all the those decapitated wives of Henry VIII! Not only that Grog escaped but that he was last seen at a pub, this doubled my admiration. As for his forenames, I thought Arthur Conan was appropriate in two senses: Firstly, King Arthur is believed to have returned in the form of a raven and secondly, Arthur Conan after the creator of the most famous sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. Along with Grog's apparent regality, I thought it would take a clever detective to escape the fortress that has imprisoned so many kings and queens.

I somehow imagined with all those tourists at the Tower that Grog had heard of California and so might have made his way, riding westward.  What more Californian than sunshine? And so Sunshine I named his California girl, Sunshine, who never had a gorgeous day I'm afraid. But A.C. Grog would delve beneath appearances. Sunshine has a funny flat head (not precisely evident in the above photo) from which her beak extends in a continuous plane. She stands out in many ways. Even though she sometimes can look mean, she has a lovely voice when in the mood. Sunshine is a hard worker and good mate to Grog. Her wings seem forever battered from aerial battles; she's not afraid to take anything on.  She seems more impatient than Grog but Sunshine is showing patience and diligence in her nest sitting. Most female ravens are smaller than the male. Not Sunshine, she is definitely Grog's equal.

Better together

Watching  a raven pair work together is admirable, instructive and inspiring. Raven survival and success are due primarily, I believe, to this trait. One is always there to back up the other; one guards while the other eats. Together they chase threatening prey from their territory. Four eyes are better than two. Their vision to me seems extraordinary. They seem to sense the approach of a hawk. But it is their coordinated efforts that are a beauty to watch. One day I was sitting at the beach with the Grogs and the inevitable seagulls. The ever-hungry Sunshine was behind me, Grog and a seagull in front. I put a small piece of bread on a nearby rock. As Sunshine and the seagull started to go for it, Grog, with his beak held the seagull by its wing so Sunshine might have the bread. Chivalrous, I thought.

Recently, a fisherman friend watched the ravens bring down a pigeon. Working as a team, one raven flew into a group of pigeons, disturbing them while the other raven followed, helping separate and isolate one pigeon. Then the ravens, having cornered it in the air, forced it to the sand where, once destabilized, they grabbed it and ate it.

An interesting counterpoint happened several weeks ago as I sat on a rock at the beach. All of a sudden there were feathers flying above and behind me. It looked to be two pigeons who came down on the other side of the bush to me. Above us all, the two ravens watched. After nothing emerged from the bush, I went to check. Partially hidden in the sand and the leaves were two big eyes staring at me with feathers in its mouth. I stared back. After perhaps a minute, straight up in the air and escaping with his life, a pigeon flew out followed by a Northern Harrier, a smallish hawk. Immediately, the two ravens set off in pursuit of the harrier. I had thought they might go for the pigeon. After they had chased the harrier out of sight, the ravens returned to the cliff. He made a low Tarzan-like sound and jumped on his mate in celebration!  

Leaving the old home (don't look back!)

I went out in the afternoon with my binoculars to try to see the Grog's nest. I thought I knew where it was (in which tree) but wasn't certain.  After studying many points of view, voila! With a bit of corvusmorphosis, I caught a big black form shift deep in a thick density of eucalyptus. Then I could see some of the large sticks that ravens weave to make their nest.

It's particularly interesting to me that the Grogs have moved home. As Bernd Heinrich points out in his raven books, ravens seem to nest in the same spot each year. The first two years I began watching the Grogs, they nested in the cliff above the beach. When they were in their cliff home (above photo by Rick @theravendiaries.com*), I did see them chasing coyotes. Perhaps they moved to avoid the coyotes eating their young. Last year they moved to a tree near the one they have chosen this year but closer to the road. From last year's nest, six Grogs were born and one was hit by a car. Perhaps this latest move, a bit further from the road and nearer the beach makes sense. I hope they haven't become 'nest flippers'. I'll check the old nest to see if anyone's moved in.

So Sunshine will be incubating the eggs for about twenty to twenty five days. I can't know exactly when she started but in previous years, I think the nestlings appeared around the beginning of April.

*If you click on the photo, it enlarges.

 

Expecting to fly

Today was kind of like old times. Grog flew down the beach with me awhile just as he began to do three years ago when I was first getting to know him. Then it was also raven spring when Sunshine was busy with their eggs and Grog had some free time. Just like a guy to be having fun while the wife keeps the nest warm! Of course, Grog can fly a million times faster than I can run but he developed a style of flying a bit, then hopping on the sand alongside me before taking to the air as if to say, 'don't you get it--take off!'. 

That first spring seemed to solidify our bond even though his wife, Sunshine, with her pushier manner often sits nearer to me. Recently, when she was still out and about, I was sitting on some wood at the beach and she tried to pick my pocket. As long as I don't make eye contact when they are close, they will both come within inches of me. They seem to like to sit just behind me, one on either side or one in front of me with the other behind. I'm reminded of the Norse myth of Odin having a raven on either shoulder to tell him about the world. No doubt the Grogs have been trying to tell me things, still to be translated. Also, I think their stance is a way of taking command, like having me covered and themselves at the same time.

Synchronized swimmers of the air

It's hard to get away from the beauty and dexterity of raven flight. Their timing seems based on an acute awareness of their partner. Their sense of fun in flying is impossible to miss. Most days if I look, I will see a group of ravens soaring, diving, rolling, tucking their wings to fly upside down and then rising again together. Windy days seem to soar their spirits. I have watched them for hours racing with the wind, dipping and diving and then making their way back to start all over again. They also quork with seeming delight or perhaps in accolade of each other's maneuvers.

In the sky, ravens and crows can at first be difficult to distinguish even though the raven weighs about four times as much as the crow according to Bernd Heinrich. Generally, ravens have wedge-shaped tails while crows have squarer tails. The raven's wingspan is up to four feet wide while the crow's is about two and a half. Also, individual ravens are hard to tell apart unless they have some missing tail or wing feather or an unusually-shaped beak. I have found the surest way to identify a pair is by its territory or how they identify me ie. what sounds they make if they see me.

Even though ravens congregate for group flying, at other times a pair fiercely keeps everyone out of their territory. They seem to have definite lines drawn in the air. The beach where I run appears to have been divided by four, possibly five raven pairs. Excepting this time of year with the raven's narrow focus on the nest, they patrol their territory diligently. Yet, they don't hesitate to call for help from their fellow ravens and cousin crows when there is a red-tail or other hawk to chase away.

A pair of Cooper's hawks is nesting in a tree near the Grog's nest. The Grogs and the Coopers are contesting the territory. I saw Sunshine quickly leave the nest only to be attacked by the Cooper's hawk. Although the Cooper's hawk is smaller than the raven, more similar in size to the crow, the Cooper's hawk's claws are deathly. It captures its prey with its feet and squeezes it to death. Will the hawk and raven young become food for each other? 

Mutual curiosity

It's not just their graceful and agile flying which makes ravens interesting to watch. Their natural curiosity in everything around them is evident. They watch people; they're interested in us. There has been nothing more thrilling than to have one of the Grogs recognize me from miles up, turn, do a roll and descend with a "kaaark" of acknowledgment.

Like us, they use their voice to express a multitude of things, harsh calls when there is danger, soft murmurings when they're rubbing beaks with their mate. Before I had gotten to know the Grogs very well, I was walking in the hills, training to go up Kilimanjaro. Because I had been advised to be able to walk for eight hours, I passed some of the hours with poetry going through my head. I'll never forget the Wallace Stevens' line that I was saying, "the real will from all its crude compoundings come," as two ravens flew over quorking loudly. There, several yards in front of me, its length the width of the path was a rattlesnake. Even though I was terrified I admired its diamonds of black and white. Naturally, I believe the ravens warned me.

All of the glorious pictures I have been posting are from my friends, Rick and Diana who are working on their site: theravendiaries.com.

Out on his own

I take back one thing I wrote initially. It wasn't my husband's comment that first brought ravens to my attention. It was reading Joan Aiken's Mortimer stories to my children, Mortimer the raven. Quentin Blake was her illustrator, a favorite.

I know that scientists abhor any anthropomorphic strain in nature study. I suppose it is to some extent unavoidable and intend to stress in my blog what I call, corvusmorphosis ie. some of the raven's point of view.

Also, I have called this The Weekly Raven so as not to be pressed for daily news. Yet, if there is a daily special, I will write about it. As far as I can tell, the Grogs have begun their nesting for 2009 and laying of eggs. A.C. Grog, Esq. is on guard and hanging about their nesting area while Mrs. Sunshine Winger-Grog is hardly to be seen. I did catch a glimpse of Sunshine this morning being fed some tasty morsel by her husband. I believe this (his feeding her) only happens when she is on the nest as it were. The rest of the year she is quite capable of getting her own food.  

Gone to the birds (or the beginning)

MEET THE GROGS

I'm afraid of waves, wings (on birds that is) and being watched, yet most mornings I am running on the beach with a raven at my side.

How this unlikely scenario unfolded was a result of my husband's comment on corvids, particularly a crow's flight: "Watch them fly and you will see their sense of fun." I had never thought of birds having fun and so began my observations and readings. I read the fascinating Mind of the Raven by Bernd Heinrich and began to look to the skies.

Crows move and work in groups; a murder of crows is their collective noun. Ravens, bigger and more silent, deeper in voice, mate for life and work as a pair. At the beach where I run, I noticed two big black birds that flew together in graceful patterns, that perched on the cliffs watchfully. I saw them and saw them see me.

That was the beginning of my interest in raven intelligence and pleasure in their personalities, these black birds with brilliant streaks of purple and green in the sun's light: black stars in the day sky.