Raven Kiss at Devils Lake

August 28, 2024August 28, 2024 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 1 Comment

The title of this post sounds, I know, rather over-the-top dramatic and gothic, but I just couldn’t resist putting all those words together.

And it really is an accurate title; being about my image “Raven Kiss” located on an interpretive sign at Devils Lake, near Mission. BC.

The story, from my perspective, started in 2021 when I was contacted by designers working with the Kwantlen on a series of interpretive signs to be located in the Mission Municipal Forest in the Stave West Forest Recreation Area.

The Stave Lake area is known to the Kwantlen people as an area where the Raven people returned after a devastating smallpox epidemic. The story is told on the sign below.

The designers were specifically looking for a photograph showing ravens as intelligent and family-oriented birds — just the reality I love to reflect in my images! I sent them a selection of pictures I thought might work and they chose Raven Kiss.

It’s been almost two years since the signs were installed along part of the Devils Lake loop trail and I’d been meaning to go out and visit them for that long.

Finally, on the spur of the moment, we decided to drive out there earlier this week.

It’s about an hour’s drive to the head of Stave Lake, on freeway and paved smaller roads.

Beyond this point, the road becomes an extremely pot-holed logging road — so don’t think of taking your brand new sports car up there. Or any vehicle with low clearance!

After a bouncy twenty minutes or so, we arrived at the Devils Lake park

This is the first of the interpretive signs, and you can see that ravens are a recurring theme.

Wooden walkway through the forest

The trail winds all around the lake, mostly through the forest, but with access to lakeside beaches at a few points along the way.

The interpretive signs continue along the trail for about two kilometres. The one with my raven image was, I think, the third to last sign in the series. All of them provided a wonderful view of the land from the perspective of the Raven people.

The trail along the far side of the lake was rockier and through forest that had been logged a long time ago.

Younger trees growing from the stump of a long-ago-logged bigger tree

The stump in the photo below shows the letterbox-shaped notches where loggers wedged in springboards above the flare of the tree — a point at which two fallers with a crosscut saw could perch to do their cutting.

Phillip in the Forest

Bracket fungus in autumnal colours

Me and Geordie on a rockier section of the trail

At the other end of the lake, there’s a floating bridge to get you back to the parking lot. I forgot to take a picture of the bridge as we got talking to a couple of young women who were swimming in the lake off the bridge. They were two of only four people we saw on the whole hike!

The view from the floating bridge.

It’s a very quiet and magical spot, so if you feel like exploring: wear good boots; bring a walking pole for the rocky, steep bits, pack a rain jacket (the mountain weather is changeable) and bring a snack. The loop took us about two and a half hours, with photo stops.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: we did see a raven! He or she flew above us, calling through the treetops and stopped for a few moments when we called back. They even returned our calls a couple of times before flying on to more important raven business.

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Raven Conversation

March 11, 2024March 10, 2024 / 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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Raven Courtship

February 22, 2024March 9, 2024 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 6 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 …