SOARING TALES OF DIVISIVE ‘BIRDS OF OMEN’

Araven is rarely just a raven. So notes journalist and twitcher Joe Shute in his tenebrous paean to the corvus corvax.

With its 1.5-metre wingspan, beady intelligence and kaleidoscopic range of calls, the bird has been vividly anthropomorphised in mythology and folklore. The Celts linked it to gods, glory and the afterlife. The Vikings made an augury of it. Not for nothing is it ravens whose presence at the Tower of London is deemed vital to British security.

Ravens have always existed symbiotically alongside humans. In medieval times they kept city streets clean. But come the Great Plague, that same scavenging instinct found them feasting on corpses, and the relationship soured.

Centuries of persecution followed, and only in the past couple of decades has the raven begun returning to British fields and urban plazas

Travelling the UK, Shute spots them nesting at Dungeness, on motorway bridges and near rubbish dumps. He finds that the bird’s return isn’t welcomed by all, however. In Caithness, where it features proudly on the county flag, it’s also held responsible for gruesome violence against livestock, an agent of bloody havoc each lambing season.

Even so, ‘ravens are not discussed as simple predators, but in deeper, more moralistic terms’, Shute observes. The feathered creatures that flap through these pages are certainly larger than life: brainy and soulful, thieving, scheming and violent.

Izabella, one of the Knaresborough Castle ravens, caused quite a stir after learning to swear at visitors. Loki, a rescue raven, enjoys KerPlunk and terrorises his junior keeper, while Truman Capote’s pet, Lola, once stole his car keys, the first page of a short story, and a house guest’s false teeth.

Shute writes superbly and his book is both evocative and provocative. He does have a weakness for doomy excess, though. What does it mean, he asks repeatedly, that these shaggy ‘birds of omen’ are resurgent at a moment when ‘our version of civilisation is beginning to flicker and dim’?

He doesn’t offer a definitive answer, and it’s tempting to wonder what kind of riposte a raven such as Izabella would make.