Communication

Raven Conversation

/ The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 7 Comments

There’s been so little snow on the mountains this winter, and so few opportunities to get up there to enjoy the quiet and see the ravens that each trip is precious.

Our most recent trip was a special treasure.

First of all, there was lots of fresh squeaky snow, and the trail conditions were lovely.

And, more importantly… I had my first conversation with a raven.

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you’ll know I’m kind of obsessed with crow and raven language. My fixation manifests in various ways: from my creation of a symbolic “Crowphabet,” to dreams of a typewriter that can communicate in “crow” and, last but not least, my ongoing efforts to learn raven calls.

I hesitated to post this video of my little raven “chat” as it reveals how terrible my attempts at making raven calls really are, but I thought you might enjoy it, for all it’s silliness.

My husband, who just viewed the video for the first time, thinks it should come with a warning.

Accordingly: Danger: May Cause Excessive Laughter. Avoid being mid-sip of hot beverages or red wine while watching.

 

And you can keep your clever remarks to yourself, Mr Steller’s Jay

I was doing my limited best to keep up our call and response — until my raven companion left me in the linguistic dust by throwing out on of those amazing and (for me) inimitable “pinball arcade” calls.

I found my new friend sitting at the viewpoint, alone and seemingly at loose ends. They were already muttering quietly when I arrived, and seemed open to my attempts at initiating a clumsy dialogue — perhaps less judgemental than a mature raven might be. Or, maybe just bored and curious about the odd new creature in the ‘hood.

My friend had a pink beak interior and you can even see some pink shining through his throat in the sunshine — a sign of a juvenile or low status raven

Also, not very good at nailing the treetop landings yet

Shortly after our little discussion, two more ravens arrived.

They were clearly a mated pair and higher in social status; they immediately made sure Junior knew who was in charge.

There was some on-the-ground interaction, consisting of the couple shooing the young one away and some aerial manoeuvres …

While the raven pair was bossy, they were tolerant enough to make me think that the young one might have been one of the pair’s offspring from a previous year.

So — it had been a pretty great raven day already — and yet the most amazing things were yet to come!

Stay tuned for the next post: Risque Ravens!!

 

 

 

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© junehunterimages, 2024. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to junehunterimages with appropriate and specific direction to the original content

 

 

 

Learning The Crowphabet

/ The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 4 Comments

Words are such tricky things.

Useful, obviously, as how else would I write my blog posts?

I thought so much about them when writing my book, City Crow Stories, around this time last year. The difficulty of finding the right ones; the trickiness of not using too many of them; the peskiness of punctuation.

Very often, I thought about the limitations of words. I was reminded of another of my mother’s favourite sayings …

As I was drifting off to sleep at night, I’d think about how much better a book would be if it was written in untranslated crow.

I imagined a keyboard that could take all of those important crow messages — the ones that are sort of obvious, and yet somehow impossible to put into words — and type them out in clear, unimpeachable prose.

Crow truth in ….

The picture in my mind was not of a computer keyboard but of a manual typewriter, perhaps because my first memories of churning out the written word involve such archaic technology.

When I was about seven my dad (for the dual purposes of entertainment and self-improvement) obtained an old typewriter for me. He was the caretaker for an multi-story Victorian building that housed a bank and various offices. Our family lived on the top floor. In the early, oh-so-mod 60’s, the offices were replacing their outdated typewriters with electric models, so my dad acquired an ancient Underwood for me to save it from the rubbish heap.

This is not the actual typewriter but it was a model very similar to this. I remember my fingers hitting those round keys many thousands of times and the satisfaction of the bell ringing at the end of a row and the tactile pleasure of hitting the return lever.

I spent countless hours typing out “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” and “now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” I knew, as I practiced over and over, that learning to type was the key to modern communication and I, at seven-and-a-half years old, was right there at the cutting edge.

As you can tell, I am rather old. Playing with my mother’s button tin was also a big treat. I probably had to walk uphill both ways to school, but can’t quite remember …

Anyway, getting back to the typewriter image in my brain … it stayed with me for most of last year until I finally gave in to it and did what I used to do with things that were on my mind when I was a kid — I just drew it out on paper.

Eventually it ended up back on the computer as this image …

Part of my intention for this year was to spend more time on images and less time on words, so the As The Crow Flies image is a sort of resolution in picture form.

There is, I realize, a dollop of ironic humour in my use of writing technology imagery to represent an aspiration to get beyond words. Best just to embrace our limitations, I say.

Another failure to escape the bonds of words and typography:  I needed to create a little chart for myself so that I could make sentences in my newly imagined Crowcabulary. Next thing you know, I’d created the Crowphabet …

It’s still a far cry from hearing first hand from crows, but I hope that the poetry of the crow shapes is a small wing flap in the right direction.

Other illustrations in the new gallery of Black and White illustrations include Crow Dance, which you may recognize from my scarf design of the same name.

I’ve also included the Urban Nature illustration that is one of a series of such images I created for the masthead of this very blog.

You can see the new gallery of Black and White crow illustrations in my shop … and feel free to start writing things in “crow” yourself. It makes shopping lists so much more entertaining!

 

 

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© junehunterimages, 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to junehunterimages with appropriate and specific direction to the original content