Residential Raven
This morning there was a strange noise outside that sounded more mechanical than organic, a kind of grating/rasping noise like a very loud electric buzzer with its housing off. Given the pouring rain I wondered who was working outside in this and what they were doing, but couldn't see anything out the windows. It also sounded a bit like a barking dog, but too regular and again, mechanical, almost metallic, like someone scraping some sort of strange improvized percussion device. Eventually I decided it was probably a bird, maybe an injured migrating goose, but I couldn't triangulate where the sound was coming from in the neighborhood.
Then I spotted what looked like a crow flapping around the big cliff that overlooks the neighborhood, only since it was a block and a half away, I decided that it was probably a raven, which would explain the noise. It went on circling and croaking intermittently, until about an hour later I heard the noise much closer - and accompanied by the unmistakable and higher-pitched alarm calls of crows. Sure enough, the raven was down a few houses in the middle of the street, eating something dropped in the road (it looked like a Twinkie, which might explain the resistance to rain, too.) If it hadn't been blue-black and shiny I would have said "What's a red-tailed hawk doing in the street?" it was that big.
The crows went on screaming and flapping about - but at a safe distance! - for long enough for me to go get my camera, at which point the raven had moved up to the nearer telephone pole, as seen here:
You can just see one of the crows on the very top of the tree in the background.
At this point it moved off - I got one blurry shot of it in flight - further into town, making its graaak graaak graaak sound all the way. The local crows jeered and patted themselves on the back and returned to wherever they had been hunkering down out of the wet before the intruder announced its presence.
(The cats did not seem to consider all this sturm und drang outside the windows anything out of the ordinary, beyond the usual corvidae feuds and frenzies of the neighborhood, but got mildly freaky when I played raven call .wav files from nature sites on the computer speaker. Go figure.)
This is the first time I've seen a raven within city limits - and I've only seen them a very few times before, and always on wooded rural routes. Granted, there is a wooded park and a large cemetery just beyond the ridge, and we have whippoorwills, which aren't supposed to be urban or even suburban critters, every summer hunting bugs around the streetlights these past 10 years at least; but a raven is about on a moose level of rarity (actually I've seen two moose on the outskirts of town) and I wonder if it has moved into town, or if it's just passerine through?
Then I spotted what looked like a crow flapping around the big cliff that overlooks the neighborhood, only since it was a block and a half away, I decided that it was probably a raven, which would explain the noise. It went on circling and croaking intermittently, until about an hour later I heard the noise much closer - and accompanied by the unmistakable and higher-pitched alarm calls of crows. Sure enough, the raven was down a few houses in the middle of the street, eating something dropped in the road (it looked like a Twinkie, which might explain the resistance to rain, too.) If it hadn't been blue-black and shiny I would have said "What's a red-tailed hawk doing in the street?" it was that big.
The crows went on screaming and flapping about - but at a safe distance! - for long enough for me to go get my camera, at which point the raven had moved up to the nearer telephone pole, as seen here:
You can just see one of the crows on the very top of the tree in the background.
At this point it moved off - I got one blurry shot of it in flight - further into town, making its graaak graaak graaak sound all the way. The local crows jeered and patted themselves on the back and returned to wherever they had been hunkering down out of the wet before the intruder announced its presence.
(The cats did not seem to consider all this sturm und drang outside the windows anything out of the ordinary, beyond the usual corvidae feuds and frenzies of the neighborhood, but got mildly freaky when I played raven call .wav files from nature sites on the computer speaker. Go figure.)
This is the first time I've seen a raven within city limits - and I've only seen them a very few times before, and always on wooded rural routes. Granted, there is a wooded park and a large cemetery just beyond the ridge, and we have whippoorwills, which aren't supposed to be urban or even suburban critters, every summer hunting bugs around the streetlights these past 10 years at least; but a raven is about on a moose level of rarity (actually I've seen two moose on the outskirts of town) and I wonder if it has moved into town, or if it's just passerine through?