Ravens

Most of you know that Andy and I used to volunteer at a wildlife rescue place in Salem.  I think that is probably where I started really being interested in wild birds, though I did always like them (and yes, I know birdwatching is generally the favorite past time of people in their 80s, but I've never really pretended to be hip and cool anyway, so this shouldn't be a surprise to you).  

We ended up volunteering at the wildlife center after Andy found an injured crow and took it there to be fixed up.  While you all may know that Andy is a big animal lover, you might not know just how much he loves crows.  I just started to understand how unusual that is because he grew up in Alaska and they don't have crows here.  This is hard to believe if you're from pretty much anywhere else where crows are about as ubiquitous in parking lots as seagulls (I also have not seen a seagull here..weird).  I think I've finally figured out where the love of crows comes from for a kid from Alaska.  It's the ravens.  

In the summertime, you don't really see ravens in Anchorage.  I read in our bird book (yes, in addition to my super cool wildflower book, we got a bird book to help identify all the frequent visitors to our bird feeder) that the ravens spend the summer in the mountains.  During that part of the year, the town is full of magpies, which have sort of the personality of a crow or a jay (meaning they are kind of jerks and also very smart, which is unsettling when you're talking about wild birds), but they look really fancy.  They don't have magpies in Oregon and I love the ones we have here.  

Once it got cold, the ravens totally invaded town.  For those of you that haven't seen ravens, they look just like crows but about 3-4 times the size.  Like their smaller brothers they also frequent parking lots.  It's hard to describe just how interesting these animals are.  They make crazy sounds that sound like talking and they are obviously very smart and crafty.  They also walk a lot more than they fly and usually the walking looks more like adorable hopping.  Here's a video that Andy took of some ravens playing in the wind outside of his office.  You can clearly see that they're doing nothing more than gliding in the breeze.  What other birds play?? (sorry the videos are small)

Here's another video that Andy took of a raven just going to town on a plastic bag in a garbage can.  Seriously, I could watch them all day.  

My only prior experience with ravens was at the Tower of London where I'm pretty sure they're trained to eat the flesh of tourists - I found those ones to be really terrifying.  The Alaskan ravens are really fascinating, and are pretty much the only birds that the cats see out the window and they don't make the "let me out so I can eat that bird!" sound at (I think because the cats know the ravens would probably fight back).  So yeah, ravens are pretty great.