Happy Crowsgiving

October 13, 2025 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 1 Comment

With apologies to readers of my blog who may be wondering where I’ve been for the past few weeks, here is a very short Crowsgiving greeting.

I have been going on many long crow walks, and there is so much news for the crow-verse, it’s hard to know where to start relaying it all.

But for now, on this Canadian Thanksgiving, here is a little round-up of the past week or so with some of the local crows.

One of the most joyful things this year has been the number of crow fledglings making it through their risky first summer — many more than I’ve seen over the past few years. Several youngsters seem to be sticking with Mom and Dad for the fall.

Lucky II is Marvin and Mavis’s fledgling from this spring and seems set to stick around, replacing Lucky I, who stayed with his parents for three years before moving on to start his own family this year. Lucky II is already a forceful personality!

Barry and Beryl, who live on the street with lots of berries, have Baby Berry and Fearless Fred (and his more conservative mate, Florence) have both of their fledglings with them, learning Fred’s fearless ways.

Crow harvest festival has been in full swing, with nuts being hauled out of trees and the road being used as a nutcracker. If dropping their bounty from a height doesn’t work, the crows wait for cars to run over them and then race in to scoop up the fragments — hopefully before the squirrels or other crows get their first.

Now that the nuts are almost all gone, it will be time to move up the street to harvest the berries on the dogwood trees. After that, it will be Persimmon-fest, when the big orange fruit reaches bird-snacking perfection in November. The persimmons are a big favourite with the starlings, but the crows manage to get their share, of course.

I hope your Thanksgiving is sociable and bountiful too!

Lucky II on bin day — the crows’ weekly fun fest!

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The Famous Raven Duet

January 30, 2025February 12, 2025 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 4 Comments

A short video of a raven duet I captured back in November has gone completely bonkers online. It’s been shared and sampled more times than I can keep track of.

I film a lot of little crow and raven moments while I’m out and about doing my main thing — photographing crows and ravens. Every once in a while, one of the clips captures the public imagination, and the November video happened to be one of those.

When I last checked the statistics, it’s been viewed well over 3 million times on Instagram

It’s amassed 294 days of viewing time. I’m quite proud of this statistic.

Considering some of the stuff people can get up to online — the more time spent simply watching ravens being amazing, the better!

It was a typical day in the snowy mountains, walking for hours with nary a sign of a raven — until we got back to the ski hill parking lot.

This is how visibility was that day

It was really foggy and I could hear the raven pair out in the mist somewhere. They could have remained incognito, but they chose to emerge from the ether and land right beside me on a wall beside the ski patrol hut.

Luckily, I had my camera out when they landed. Other conditions were less than optimal; I had an impatient dog tied to my waist and I’d taken my snow spikes off, leaving me standing precariously on a patch of ice.

At my age, the long wait times for hip replacement surgery are never far from my mind.

I was so close to the ravens that I couldn’t zoom out any more with my telephoto lens and would have liked to step back a bit to get more of them in the frame, but I was afraid of stepping on the dog, slipping on the ice, or both — so I just kept panning up and down as the ravens moved their heads.

The plus factors of the video are that the ravens are, of course, amazing and the fog was muffling most of the usual parking lot background sound effects.

Many people commented that they thought the ravens were mimicking car locking sounds. Ravens are indeed great mimicks, but the call of the raven on the left — the amazing hollow “temple bell” call — is a typical “dominant female” vocalization, often heard in remote areas far from the influence of vehicles.

Here’s a female soloist recorded on another day …

I believe that the raven in the next video, shot last winter in a snowstorm, is the raven on the right in the viral video. We were in his territory and that beak-snapping and vaguely electronic-sounding call is pretty distinctive. I can’t say for sure whether this is a standard raven call or if it’s influenced by parking lot sounds.

The duet in the November video is still much-discussed online and many musicians have sampled the calls to include in their own compositions. My favourite interpretation was this piece made by a musician halfway around the world …

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by DANI | دنی (@dani_richminds)

I enjoyed the way Dani showed himself listening to, and being inspired by the ravens before the sampling began.

Thanks to this clip, my son now finally thinks I’m cool.

Lol.

One last thing that people commented on about the video was they way the duet ends with the male giving his partner a gentle little bit of preening on the back of her neck (one of the places she can’t reach to scratch herself!) and how that action reveals the rarely-seen fluffiness of the insulating feathers below the dark, smooth and glossy outer feathers.

If you’d like to lose yourself for a few hours (or days) just watching ravens (and crows) being their amazing selves, you can park yourself in front of a screen and check out my YouTube Channel. Get yourself a cup of cocoa and settle in for a playlist like Raven Fun or Crows in Action.

Also, just a reminder that romantic raven prints make perfect Valentine’s Day gifts!

SHOP RAVEN PRINTS >

(More romantic than roses …)

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January — Ice and Bouquets

January 28, 2025February 12, 2025 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 4 Comments

Here’s an early Valentine’s bouquet from my garden.

The north-facing garden is mostly frozen. Birdbath and hummingbird feeders are deployed and all the plants start out the morning looking frozen and, if not quite dead, at least pretty depressed.

But the irrepressible hellebore motto seems to be “The show must go on!”

Despite the frigid nights, as soon as the sun hits the yard the hellebores miraculously bounce back to create an illusion of spring.

We can take guidance from them if we like, or simply gaze at them in joy and wonder.

Postscript: Looks as if we have colder temperatures and snow coming next week, so the curtain may have to fall on the hellebore show for a while. The hellebores may need saving from their own optimism and eagerness for spring.

Time to deploy my supply of dry leaves and insulating cloth to tuck our colourful little friends up, keeping them (fingers crossed) alive for second act later in the spring.