More about Ravens
Tuesday, August 5, 2025
More about Ravens
Today’s special animal friend is still Corvus corax, because there’s more to say about him! Although ravens are not a highly gregarious or flocking species, they have a considerable amount of communication and social interaction. Ornithologists have identified between 15 and 31 different classes of calls for different purposes. (The wide range indicates that some are lumpers and some are splitters.)
One of the categories is “begging,” which is used by chicks toward parents. It’s a high-pitched, faint call from newly hatched chicks and a raspy, shrill demand from fledged adolescents. This call is also used by adult birds in captivity as they interact with human handlers. In this video, you can see an adult-sized youth making a real spectacle of himself:
A “yell” call gathers ravens around a food source. In this video, someone is using a decoy call to attract ravens:
Like mockingbirds and thrashers, ravens will engage in “vocal play,” spending minutes at a time going through their whole repertoire of sounds, including imitations of other birds’ calls and human sounds such as car alarms, shouts, and construction equipment.
Ravens who are closely involved with humans will learn to mimic speech and song. Their ability to produce a variety of tones is really extraordinary.
Ravens have a variety of feeding strategies in coordination with one another or with other animals. Birds of the World reports a case of a raven’s attacking a cat which was carrying a mouse in its mouth. This caused the cat to drop the mouse, which was snatched by a second, previously unobserved raven. Ravens follow large predators such as mountain lions or wolves to scavenge kills. They follow agricultural equipment to feed on fleeing rodents, birds, or insects. They hang around busy roads waiting for roadkill.
In suburban and urban areas, garbage dumps are a main feeding area for ravens. They can become a real nuisance because they can be very loud, and of course, they are leaving lots of droppings.
More on ravens in the next episode!
I pulled the plug on the Mothership this morning. I'll miss chatting with quite a few people, but it's for the greater good.
The interfaith luncheon yesterday was very nice. The around 40 attendees sat at tables of 6 each, having been advised to sit with people they didn't know. My table had five women and a man, of whom four were Catholic - all from different parishes - one Methodist, and one Baha'i. After we ate some lunch - potluck, vegetarian - the discussion guidelines were explained. We had about ten minutes of general talk about our concepts of our purpose in life. Then, for about 30 minutes, we discussed grief, with an emphasis on "acceptance," the final stage of grief according to some psychologists. Then a representative of each table shared a brief summary of each group's discussion.
At my table, one woman said she wasn't interested in "acceptance": her son was murdered about a year ago - "Wrong place, wrong time" - and she was still working through "anger." Some emphasized grieving over the state of the world, while others spoke more about grief over personal losses. A common point was grief as a catalyst for growth. Discussions at other tables, according to their reports, went in different directions, but everyone agreed they had an edifying discussion.
The point of these events, which are held quarterly, is simply for people from different faith traditions to get together and talk about areas of life that we all have in common. I hope I'll be able to attend another some time. It depends on the scheduling, which varies according to the availability of a host site.