It’s spring break and I’m in the mountains for the week. I hope to fish on a nearby tailwater, but this time of year there are no guarantees. It snowed the day after I arrived. Fortunately, it was just a bit and is mostly melted off by now.
During the storm one of my favorite birds stopped by. A raven flew into the yard and found a suitable perch in a birch tree. It stayed there some time, long enough for me to get distracted and turn away. I heard it call a few times, but when I turned back to find it, the raven was gone.
I miss these old, wise birds as they don’t wander out on the plains where I live, and grackles, the “big” black bird of flat country, don’t measure up. I only see them in the Walmart parking lot. I’m not sure I should read anything into that.
I think of that raven call as a caw, but it is often described as a grunk or croak. The cawing of crows was a familiar sound in Southern California where I grew up. We lived in a suburban neighborhood that was surrounded by hills and open space, so crows were a constant presence.
In the evening there was always a large flight of crows over the neighborhood, as the birds flew from foraging sites in the parking lots of big-box stores toward the bamboo jungle along a river where they roosted.
The caw of a crow and grunk of a raven sound much alike. When I travelled from crow country to the places ravens preferred, the surrounding mountains and deserts, and heard a raven, it sounded like the crows back in the suburbs. But when you hear the birds back-to-back, on an edited recording, you hear both how similar and distinct the calls of the two birds are.
Crow caws are a little lighter and higher pitched, almost trilly. That grunk of the raven is a deeper warble-like sound that at times seems almost synthetic, like a product of a studio recording when the producer turns the reverb up to 11.
That grunk is important for raven communication networks. They grunk from time to time just to let the birds in the neighborhood know they’re still around. They probably recognize the familiar calls of local birds, and the unique call of an intruder. This may lead to territorial tussles.
Ravens also use that grunk to override territorial claims if they discover a large food source, such as carrion, in a place they’re not supposed to be. In that situation, they’ll grunk wildly, calling in as many ravens as possible so that the number of intruders will overwhelm the territorial instincts of the local birds.
When I was a younger, more clueless human, I was prone to flaunting my wildlife knowledge, which was admittedly beyond the range of most city folk. So, when I travelled to the mountains with friends ignorant of avian oddities, I corrected them when they misidentified the big black birds prowling the parking lots below the ski slopes as crows.
“That’s a raven,” younger me would scold. “Can’t you see that big bill?”
These days I’m more likely to call a pronghorn an antelope in the presence of someone who I know will be annoyed by my taxonomical imprecision. I suppose that’s evidence I haven’t grown up as much as I think I have, but describing a lake trout as a trout or a pronghorn as an antelope or a bison a buffalo is a less arrogant form of juvenile behavior.
One legend I don’t ascribe to is that ravens and crows are harbingers of death. Watch a raven fly sometime. Do you think any being associated with the Grim Reaper would perform barrel rolls with such vigor?
No way. A raven is the embodiment of life.