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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Shorebirds, or charadriiformes, are birds that like shores.  The end.  Wait, no, they may have evolved in and prefer shores, but some get farther afield.  Seagulls are the most familiar, but little brown sandpipery things are also familiar to most of us.  Hard to identify and incredibly diverse at that.  Seagulls stray pretty far from shore, crisscrossing the continent to eat garbage.  Also found inland are killdeers.

Killdeers are more of those little brown sandpipery things.  They have bold black and white horizontal striping on their head and neck, but it doesn’t look at all bold from fifteen feet away.  Instead it serves to break up their shape, make them very hard to see.  Effective camouflage, which is why you see it on everything from badgers to nuthatches.  They have a big blood red eye, but still, nice looking little birds.

They sing “killdeer, killdeer, killdeer,” and I feel like I’ve only ever heard them do that song when in flight?  They live in scrubby fields, nesting in tall grass.  Unfortunately, fields get mowed, so they probably face a lot of tragedies.  Sometimes they’ll live in a parking lot, where grass grows in the cracks at the edges, and again, if a new tenant decides to make something proper of the location, bye-bye killdeers.

I used to see them in the abandoned lot across the street from the Federal Way Transit Center, but that field was converted into a well manicured park, and I haven’t seen them there since.  I saw one on a little trail by the WinCo in Federal Way, and I’ve seen them near a shore up by the Canadian border, on a bird watching trip.  I’ve heard them before dawn or after dusk near my old workplace in Auburn and even in my apartment complex in Federal Way.  Would not be surprised to hear them by my condo, tho I haven’t yet.

For all that, they’re still not a very common sighting for me – now.  I used to see huge flocks of them, a long time ago, when I had no idea what they were.  Auburn is a town cut in half by a big wide train yard.  Just a few over- and under- passes get you past those tracks.  They’re hopping these days, but when I was young, back in the 1990s, they were less busy, less well maintained.  The yard had little activity and little security.  When walking home from a friend’s house at three in the morning, or from watching a movie at the mall, I would sometimes walk along A Street by that train yard, or walk across it.  And there were so many killdeers there.

I can ID them years after the fact because I remembered their call.  They’d run around on the ground or take flight in fear of me, or stray breezes, or just for fun.  I didn’t understand what they were doing; still don’t.  Before I saw them running, I’d even thought are those bats?  Is the killdeer call echolocation?  I could only see them in the distance, drab and flappy.  I didn’t know much of anything back then.

Anyway, next time you’re in an abandoned parking lot or crappy gravel pit or funky field, anywhere USA, if you see a lil brown shorebird flap and killdeer away, pay your respects.

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