Summer 2018
Pacific Northwest
There's a pair of ravens that lives in my neighborhood. I hear them all through the year, various quorks and knocking and other conversational language between them, sometimes together sometimes way across the woods, but just the two of them, unlike the dozen or so crows who also live around here.
In summer, things change radically with the ravens. Every year since I’ve been paying attention, they hatch out a nestful of baby ravens, who scream at them incessantly for weeks and weeks, usually following them around, until suddenly the youngsters go quiet. The ravens of summer are a constant auditory presence, and often visual too, which I really like in spite of the yelling because ravens are otherwise such shy remote birds.
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The yelling calls of the juveniles are so unlike the dignified resonant utterances of the adults it’s almost comical listening to them badgering their parents. From morning til night I know exactly where they are since the sound carries literally for miles.
Occasionally I hear them flying overhead, making that subtle weff weff weff sound that crows do not. Ravens are huge birds with a big wingspread. Even more occasionally I manage to catch a photo of them, as with the youngster in the title image above. There were three youngsters this year, and I came to call them the 3 amigos since they were always together.
Ravens tend to hang out in the woods, but once I watched the 3 amigos begging in a newly plowed field, hopping and flapping and making quite a ruckus. It’s hard to see at this distance but you might be able to make out the red gape of the youngsters as they beg. As if the parents need any more clues haha.
According to Birds of North America, incubation is three weeks with hatching occurring between early April and mid May. They fledge after five weeks in the nest, sometime between mid May and mid June. They stay in their “natal territory for 1-6 weeks or longer, probably depending on food resources”, by which I think they mean that the youngsters get kicked out when local food gets scarce. Most juvenile ravens become independent sometime in July or August. (birdsna.org/...)
One day I saw the whole family across the bay on a steep bluff. The kids were poking around in the grass in a desultory way, hopping from rock to rock, but mostly yelling. I took some video. Turn up the volume, since they’re a fair distance off, at maximum zoom.
(click on the settings wheel in the lower right corner to choose HD for better resolution)
Besides just watching this family on the hillside, there’s a reason to listen to their calls: I stumbled across a perplexing raven vocal incident about a month later I just could not figure out.
I was bicycling down a path through the woods near my house and heard that unmistakable juvenile raven yelling call. It was surprising since they’d gone silent a couple of weeks before, and the conventional wisdom is that the adults drive the youngsters away from their territory at a certain point. I’ve always wondered where they go? but that’s a different mystery.
Luckily, the path took me closer and closer to the bird making the yelling noise. I stopped at a good spot to look around, and was really surprised me to to see it perched 30 feet or so up on a branch — in plain sight. That’s very unusual. Unless flying by, ravens are invisible in the foliage of our tall trees.
I stood and watched it for a while. It didn’t fly off, so I tried getting some video. This is pretty jerky footage since I’m holding the camera pointing upward, with nothing to brace it. But listen to the calls it makes.
That sure sounds like a juvenile yelling/begging call.
But then it changed its tune! Listen to it a few minutes later:
That’s an adult quork. From the same bird! What the heck? Which was it?
Stumped, I sent an email to a corvid expert who I’d corresponded with earlier in the summer. Kaeli Swift is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington, and had kindly ID’d the bird in the title photo as a juvenile raven not a crow back in June. I wrote to her again with links to these YouTube videos, asking her opinion. Here’s her reply:
“That’s definitely a young bird. Seems like it’s just practicing its adult voice. They’ll be independent and kicked off the territory soon enough so it doesn’t surprise me that you’re seeing this transition.”
— Kaeli Swift, corvid expert, PhD candidate at Univ Washington (her blog: corvidresearch.blog)
How cool is that! The juveniles can choose what kind of call to make. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. Ravens are wicked smart birds and mysteriously deep. Even the babies. Except they haven’t figured out how to hide in the foliage yet. That’s another clue to this one’s youth. The “invisible” adult ravens have a knack for throwing their voices — I’ll be watching the spot where I’m hearing them talking, hoping to see them, and then they fly out from somewhere else! A clever trick. Very ravenish.
I haven’t heard a juvenile call again. These youngsters may have been driven away by now, but if they haven’t I wouldn’t be able to tell by sound since they’re using their grownup voices now.
I do see and hear ravens quite often in the neighborhood. It never gets old though. They are the quintessence of mystery and elegance, especially as the season turns toward fall and winter. The ravens of summer are more accessible to an earthbound clod like me, and what a treat that is!
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Skies these days in the PNW islands are not as brilliantly blue as they were earlier in the summer, but at least the worst of the wildfire smoke we had this week has blown away in the onshore westerly flow. Foggy. Sun burning through. What a relief after that toxic acrid oppressive smoke.
What’s up in nature in your area today?
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