An intelligent survivor and scavenger

The ravens have returned to Chichester Cathedral. The pair nested there in the spring much to the annoyance of Maverick and his wife, the resident peregrine falcons. There was a lot of quarrelling between them then. The peregrine gave their black neighbours a very hard time, with many a near miss between them. But the ravens are also masters of the airways in their own but very different way.

They cannot dive at up to 200 miles an hour with the precision of an electronically guided missile. They cannot claw a bird the size of a duck in mid-air and carry it back half a mile to pluck it in peace at the top of the battlement but they do know how to judge the speed and vector of the approaching missile to within a hundredth of a second. Then they can side-slip quicker than a Spitfire. They have wings like the blades of a university racing boat.

Rolling over in mid-air is part of their courtship display anyway. They practice that manoeuvre throughout the year but especially now onwards to February as they claim territory space again.

I have watched ravens and peregrines fighting each other for years. So did my father in 1921 when he wrote all about them in his nature stories set on the moors and cliffs of Devon.

Ravens are increasing all over Britain as protection laws are better enforced. I know of a wood near Chichester where in autumn and winter I can see up to twenty of them. They have a communal roost in an old pine forest and on windy days they will be out and about above the trees playing and gliding together as the youngsters of last year begin to realise that there is more to family life than just living with the parents.

You will see them starting to pair up in mid-winter during these play-flights and after a while you will notice these pairs bonding, and finally leaving home and looking for a place of their own. That may be a very tall pine tree in the middle of a wood, or perhaps a nice tall building like a cathedral if they have pretensions to grandeur and city life. I should think the present Cathedral pair came from that pine forest near the city.

Ravens pair for life. They have fascinated people for millenia, usually mistakenly as portents of doom, as in Macbeth. Superstition in Roman times and probably long before, based on the terrifying sounds of winter storms at night sounding like the croaks of ravens helped give rise to the speculation called the Wild Hunt. A ghostly company of hunters ride across the sky searching for dead souls and these are joined by earthly animals forming spectral packs which were often called ‘Night Ravens’. Wild geese, bitterns, curlews and whimbrels were in widespread superstition known as Night Ravens depending on what part of the world you lived in.

‘The night crow cried, a boding luckless time. Dogs howled, and hideous tempests shook down trees. The raven rook’d her on the chimney pot’, Shakespeare told us, while Spenser in the Fairie Queen thought that ‘And after him the owles and night ravens flew, those hateful messengers of heavy tidings.’

In fact this enormous black bird with its dinosaur-like croak is nothing more than a clever survivor and scavenger tidying up the dregs of human waste. When tamed as in this picture from a Dickens’ novel it makes a friendly companion with intelligence equalling that of a pet dog.