wild ravens

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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I was worried that I wasn’t going to get well soon enough to go up on the mountains again this winter. Luckily, it’s been snowing like crazy up there (as well as in the city!) and I finally started to feel better earlier this week.

Yesterday we headed up to Mount Seymour for a short outing.

Nothing too ambitious, just a nice stroll in the winter wonderland.

The silence in the snow-baffled woods … the traditional peanut butter sandwich at the Dog Mountain lookout … and fresh, fresh air, were all very therapeutic.

But he most joyful thing of all was seeing the ravens playing.

I’ve never seen them have fun with snowballs before, but conditions yesterday were extremely snowball friendly. In fact, I developed a ball of it under one of my feet at the end of our walk. I tried to knock it off with my walking pole, but it was so persistent that part of it was still stuck the underside of my boot when we got home. This snow just INSISTED on being made into snowballs, and the ravens were happy to oblige.

As you can see from the video below, they were quite committed to this game. They reminded me very much of puppies playing.

Gloating when you’ve got the snowball is an important part of the game.

If you lie on the snowball, that makes it hard for your opponent to get it, rather like rugby.

Flying away with the snowball is the final solution.

Let the good times roll!

Just to emphasize how puppy-like the ravens were, here are Geordie and Luke wrestling this morning.

Compare the fun and strategy to these two ravens …

In my trips to the mountains in the winter, I’ve seen the ravens playing in the snow many times — rolling in it, playing with found objects — but I’ve never seen them having so much fun with snowballs. It wasn’t just this one pair either — I could see other groups further away engaged in the same game.

A few minutes later they all flew away to pursue other winter pastimes, so I felt very lucky to have watched this, and keen to share the fun with you!