On the Fly – The Ever More Common Raven

The common raven (Corvus corax) and its relative the American crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) are two birds you can find in most parts of Contra Costa County, including Martinez—throughout California, in fact. It wasn’t always so. When Europeans came to California, bringing guns, these birds learned to keep their distance. But crows found agriculture irresistible and reemerged, and ravens have recently ventured out from the wilderness into developed areas in order to take advantage of our…garbage. These intelligent scavenger/predators have learned to scrounge not only in landfills but in trashcans and dumpsters.

Ravens aren’t as common as crows, but they can be found in Briones and occasionally at the Martinez waterfront and McNabney Marsh. I’ve even seen them in the parking lot of Diablo Foods in Lafayette, not to mention downtown Berkeley. And they’re not just passing through—many are year-round residents.

How can you tell if the bird you’re looking at is a crow or a raven? Ravens are much bigger than crows—they weigh about twice as much. Ravens have longer, shaggier plumage on their chests. In flight, ravens’ tails are wedge-shaped or rounded at the end; crows’ tails are more straight across. Ravens soar and crows don’t.

Probably the best way to tell is sound: the crow’s familiar “caw, caw” (heard whenever the nuclear power plant comes into view on The Simpsons) is a far cry from the raven’s “grawk,” which is so deep and resonant it sounds almost like a drum.  Both birds are mimics and make plenty of other sounds as well. Besides their various calls, there are wing whistles, bill snapping, and clicking noises. They can imitate speech. Biologist and author Bernd Heinrich trained a raven to say “Nevermore.”

Ravens have big brains, among the largest in the bird world. They don’t just randomly do smart things, they solve problems. Like crows, they can count. They can recognize individual humans, and they can transmit information—adaptations, tricks, heaven knows what—from one generation to the next. They sometimes hunt in teams, one distracting a hawk while the other grabs the squirrel it just caught, one distracting an osprey while the other steals her eggs, and so on.

A pair of ravens can produce as many as seven offspring every year. And they will eat almost anything: carrion, eggs, insects, fish, grains, buds, berries, and the things we provide, such as pet food and the aforementioned garbage. So they are not just predators, they are what biologists call “subsidized predators.” Hence the population explosion. In their increased numbers, ravens are proving to be a threat to desert tortoises, marbled murrelets, least terns, black-necked stilts, American avocets, and other vulnerable species.

Ravens are, of course, an omen of death to humans as well as tortoises and terns. In Sweden they are believed to be the ghosts of murdered people. In mainstream American culture we have Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” to thank for the bird’s ominous reputation. It’s the poem that keeps on giving: I counted at least a dozen purportedly scary movies on Netflix with “raven” in the title. There’s one starring John Cusack that will be released next March and sounds promising. But it must have been another aspect of the raven—the trickster aspect—that led me to the Roger Corman version, starring Vincent Price and Peter Lorre. I watched the whole thing. It’s on YouTube.

Cultures worldwide dance around the boundaries of morality with tales starring such diverse tricksters as Coyote, Anansi, Brer Rabbit, and Hanuman, the divine monkey. Raven plays the part in much of North America, especially the Pacific Northwest. And no wonder. Ravens have been known to invade open cars, raid tents, steal golf balls, and poke holes in airplanes. Young ravens slide down snowbanks for no apparent reason other than having fun. They play stick in midair, play catch with wolves and dogs, and fly in loops. One was observed flying upside-down for half a mile.

Does any of this sound familiar? The mimicry, the inventiveness, the curiosity, the heedlessness? To quote Heinrich’s Mind of the Raven, “Several features of the raven’s life history and ecology are comparable to those of the hominids.” Ravens can thank Edgar Allen Poe and the trickster myths for making them the essential birds of Halloween, but maybe it’s the resemblance between us that makes them so very scary.