As I mentioned previously, I’m going to be doing a speed writing event on the weekend that ends with MLK Jr Day, and I invite ye all to come along. I’m going to write about 12,500 words a day from Friday Jan 17th through Monday Jan 20th. You can set more modest goals and only participate a few of those days if you please. Fiction or non-fiction is fine. Post in the comments or elsewhere with links in the comments, or be shy / inviso and just mention your word count when you get to resting points. I’ll read yours if you read mine; critique can be as baby-gloved as you please. Holler in the comments if you want to join.
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Black-feathered harbingers of doom all look the same. If you can tell crows from ravens at a distance, you’re sharper than I’ll ever be. The only ways I can tell are by habits and vocalizations, and mostly the latter.
The first place I strongly suspect that I saw a raven, not a crow, was in Seattle, at a flophouse some penny-ante drug lord had briefly tricked my family into renting, surrounded by seven foot tall, no doubt tick infested grass. Me and my siblings were feral monkeys entertained by nonsense, pushing our feet at each other’s faces and saying “stinkyfoot, stinkyfoot,” out on the porch. Suddenly a sing-song voice from the top of a very tall utility pole sang it back to us. Quoth the raven, “stinkyfoot stinkyfoot heeheeheehee.” It must have said it at least twice, because I recall looking straight at the bird – it must have gotten our attention.
It’s possible that was a crow. They can mimic; they’re much more common in the city. But they are usually not that good at mimicry.
Not that ravens are spot on either. I might have saved ravenposting for another day, but for the first time I’ve been able to definitively ID one in Federal Way, in the parking lot of the WinCo, just last Friday. It was the voice. Ravens have a big, echoing, throaty voice. What was the call? I don’t know if it was part of the usual raven repertoire, but to me it sounded very much like the world’s worst impression of a crow.
I still wasn’t 100% sure it wasn’t the world’s most raveny sounding crow, until I saw it flying away – mobbed by crows! There were even more chasing this raven than I’d usually see chasing birds of prey, and it was only a little bit larger than they were. I may not be able to tell ravens from crows, but the birds themselves have no trouble with that at all.
(off topic, the same day I may have glimpsed a slightly leucistic crow, grey instead of black, but it was hard to be 100% sure in driveby.)
I only saw definitely ID’d ravens as an adult for the first time this last October, on my honeymoon to the Olympic Peninsula, which is why their voices were still fresh in my mind. They have a pretty crowish lifestyle to go with their crowish looks. They have smaller groups, are more likely to fly solo, are larger (barely), and have a much wider variety of vocalizations.
Crows elsewhere in the world might be much smaller than ravens in those places, more easy to tell apart. I speak from Pacific Northwest USA experience. Both species have a lot of individual variation, and I have no doubt that here the very largest crow may be larger than the very smallest raven. But when you see the mobbing, it’s clear enough who’s who. It’s also an opportunity to see how ravens are just that little bit better at soaring flight, with fewer wing strokes.
They avoid cities and suburbs where crows dominate, because crows treat them very badly. I wonder that ravens might prefer higher altitudes, because I saw them the most as I was close to mountains, but probably not. I know they can be found in a lot of different biomes, from US Southwestern desert to the northern island of Hokkaido, Japan. Ravens get around. Like ospreys, barn owls, barn swallows, and peregrine falcons, this is a “cosmopolitan” bird, found across much of the world.
Back when Karl of Linne was still giving pretentious Latin names to everybody, they’d be considered the same species over the whole range. But these days, genetic work is helping tease out subspecies and “cryptic” species, nested within larger populations, and I don’t know where ravens stand in that regard at the moment. Humans only spread around the world about 1200 generations ago? Something like that. In a similar space of time, ravens have had 10,000 generations, so likely to have speciated more than we have, one would imagine.
On the honeymoon we stayed at a cabin-esque thing by a lake in the woods. In the evening, the ravens would make a call like the world’s biggest bullfrog. Not super far off from the call of a great blue heron, as I think about it. But at least one time we witnessed the bird making the noise, so I’m pretty sure on that one. Their day time call is a little less booming but still froggy, and they do all sorts of weird variants and mimicry as well. I’m glad they’re still able to make some kind of room for themselves in a crow’s world. Nice to see somebody other than the usual corvids on occasion.
What kinda raven stories do you have?
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another stewart says
Wikipedia tells me that ravens aren’t a natural group (clade). The common raven is found across nearly all of the Holarctic. According to a cladogram dug out of a web search its nearest relatives are the fan-tailed raven of the Middle East and the Chihuahuan raven of Mexico and the southwestern US. This is followed by a group consisting of the brown-neck raven (Middle East), pied crow (subsaharan Africa) and Somali crow/dwarf raven. The next outgroup is composed of the white-necked raven (afromontane) and thick-billed raven (Ethiopian highlands). The next group out takes one definitely out of raven territory, as it consists of the rook and Hawaiian craw.
The ravens of Australia and their extinct New Zealand relatives are a subgroup of a clade Australian and Melanesian species, which is in itself nested in a clade of mostly eastern Palaeoarctic and Oriental species (it also contains the western Palaeoarctic common/hooded crow and the Nearctic American crow), which is sister to the “raven/rook” group described above. The outgroups to these two groups combined are firstly the subsaharan Cape crow and a clade of Neotropical (mostly Caribbean) species.