Raven Courtship Jo

February 22, 2024February 22, 2024 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 3 Comments

With no new snow on the mountains and none forecast, we decided to head for the hills anyway. I needed to see some ravens!

Predictably, trail conditions were horrible. There’s enough packed and icy snow in shaded areas to make boot spikes necessary — at least for those of us in the knee and hip replacement candidacy stage of life! It makes for rough-going and ghostly chain-clanking sound effects as your spikes drag over the rock, mud (so much mud) and roots between the sporadic snow patches.

But it was worth the slog on Monday as we witnessed some new-to-us raven courtship behaviour.

At first, the ravens were just quietly calling to each other in the trees, but seeing several groups of hikers putting down backpacks and then walking away (!) to get a better look at the view proved too intriguing for their innate pickpocketing instincts.

They seemed quite young and, at first, didn’t display any romantic behaviour. They hardly even seemed to spend much time close to each other — although that doesn’t necessarily tell you that they’re not “together.” In fact, they were working as a well-practiced team, with one raven distracting the humans while their partner subtly worked their way to the rear — out of sight and out of mind. You’d be surprised how many people only see the one raven in front of them, getting close to their snacks, and think they’ve fooled the bird by cleverly putting the bag behind them! The ravens would be less surprised.

There was at least one other raven audible in the trees and this pair seemed very attentive whenever the hidden raven made the “knocking call.” Head feathers would go up and they would stop everything and listen. I have the feeling that these two were the junior couple in this territory.

After a while they flew off. I thought they’d be gone but, instead, they put on a display that would shame the Abbotsford Air Show. They soared, dipped, barrel-rolled and flew impossibly close to each other — a breath-taking version of Dancing With the Stars! The whole performance seemed like a raven tango.

The formation flying did seem to turn their thoughts to love and courtship.

As soon as they landed I heard a very agitated raven call and, for the first time ever, I saw the raven female imitating a fledgling — begging to be fed by the male.

This is a performance I’ve seen many times between crow partners down in the city, but I’ve never been lucky enough to see the raven version. So exciting!

It’s all part of the preparation for nesting season when, for about three weeks, the female will be completely dependant on her mate for food when she’s confined to egg sitting duty. In order to make sure her partner has definitely got the gist of how things need to go, she’ll start these begging behaviours well ahead of time.

Raven couples are pretty generous with mutual grooming and scratching of the itchy parts that a single raven can’t reach all year round, but they really crank up the allopreening just before nesting season. They need to make sure that the bond between them is solid for all the hard work of nest building, nest guarding and fledgling rearing ahead.

The word “allopreening” doesn’t sound terribly romantic, but lots of tenderness seems to go into the mutual tending of feathers.

Sometimes the result of a particularly thorough head preening can be a bit on the hilarious side …

And the grooming is a two-way process …

So, in spite of the sad lack of snow, it’s still beautiful up on the mountain and worth braving the less than ideal trail conditions.

And one raven sighting is worth slogging through a lot of mud!

Some more posts on raven behaviour, romantic and otherwise:

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Crow Stories Within Stories

February 16, 2024 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / Leave a comment

The Still Creek Crow Roost is like a nesting doll of crow stories.

It’s an action-packed epic with a cast of thousands — bringing to mind, in scale and scope, something like Lord of the Rings or Ben Hur (depending on your generational terms of reference.)

But if you stay awhile you start to notice that there’s also a whole lot of When Harry Met Sally and Monty Python going on too!

We took in the show for our Valentine’s Day date night — no reservations necessary — and only a 50/50 chance of getting pooped on. We know how to have a good time!

It was the first time we’d visited the roost for a long time. I’d been worried that it might be too depressing to see a depletion of the roost after all of the development in the area, plus avian flu.

But anyway, for some reason, we felt like being in the company of thousands of crows for Valentine’s, so off we went — and it was as amazing as ever.

When you’re in the middle of the roost, it feels like a whole world of crows. The tide of birds flowing in from all directions feels like one expansive and purposeful being.

It takes a while to get used to the cacophony created by thousands of crows cawing and yelling over each other — although their calls are a minor note amid the roar of rush hour traffic. The sheer kinetic energy generated by thousands of birds moving in large groups can also be a little disorienting at first.

Once your mind adjusts to the volume and scale of it all, you can sometimes focus in on some of the small crow moments going on amid the mayhem.

For example, the little scene in the video below …

The yelling second-to-left crow on the street light seems to be a traffic marshal, directing the flow of birds with a continuous series of barked directions.

“Your party is booked in for the Hydro wires tonight, so keep left. Next! OK, your group has reservations for the MacDonald’s roof, so hard right here. Keep moving!!”

Comic relief is provided by another crow and their repeated efforts to land on the steeply curved end of the lamp. I’ve seen this routine many times and in many places — as less experienced crows try to make that tricky technical calculation regarding the camber and surface slipperiness of a typical street light. It takes a while for the young ones to learn that you can only fit so many crows on these lamps — and the last one to arrive always gets the vexingly convex end of the stick.

A few other moments from date-night at the roost ….

A flurry of last minute indecision — branches or wires for the night’s lodgings?