Tower of London’s royal ravenmaster reveals secrets
He treats cherished birds to biscuits soaked in blood
LONDON — There are some weird gigs associated with the British royal household. There’s a keeper of the queen’s stamps. There’s a grand carver and a royal clock winder.
And then there’s the ravenmaster, Christopher Skaife, charged with caring for the seven corvids that reside at the Tower of London, the 11th-century walled fortress that today is one of Britain’s most popular tourist sites.
Every tour, every article, every book mentioning the Tower ravens includes the legend about how King Charles II issued a royal decree to protect the ravens forevermore, after being warned that if the birds ever flew the palatial coop, “the Tower itself will crumble to dust and a great harm will befall the kingdom.”
Great story, total codswallop, says Skaife, who has poured through the archives and found zip. The first mention of ravens at the Tower appears not in the 1600s, when Charles reigned through the years of plague and fire, but during the Victorian age, when gothic revival was all the rage and Charles Dickens kept a raven as a pet.
Still, Skaife is obsessive in his care of the birds. He treats them to dog biscuits dripped in blood. They offer him the occasional rat’s tail in return.
I met up with the ravenmaster on a drizzly Saturday morning. He was wearing his everyday uniform: a flat-brimmed hat and dark blue tunic with a scarlet insignia honoring the queen. He is a former machine gunner, who after 25 years of service in the British army became a Yeoman Warder, one of 37 elite guards.
“Well, well,” he said, pointing upward. “There’s Merlina, right on cue.”
The ravenmaster has spent the past 11 years around these birds, living at the Tower with his family — a life he details in a newly published autobiography. He is sweet on all his ravens, but especially Merlina. (First named Merlin; ravens are notoriously difficult to sex.)
She can be a bit standoffish, Skaife said, admiringly. “Likes to do her own thing.”
He explained that the ravens residing at the Tower these days come from bird breeders. At night, Skaife coaxes them into airy enclosures. In the morning, he releases them from their dormitories, in order, from the beta bird to the most dominant.
Up close, the ravens look like enormous crows dipped in oil. They’re positively iridescent, with tool-like claws and butcher’s beaks “like a Swiss army knife,” Skaife said. When they kill a mouse, a few surgical snips, a hard tug and fur is peeled away as a glove from a hand.
What do they do all day? They perch on benches. They play with the magpies. They rummage the trash bins.
Skaife said the ravens, like most Brits, have a weakness for potato chips, which they scavenge and then wash in puddles if the flavoring — say, cheddar and onion — is not to their liking.
One raven, Poppy, will allow herself to be petted by Skaife. But he warns the public to stand back. These are not docile pets — and the ravenmaster himself bares the scars of nasty bites.
The ravens can fly, but not very well, and not too far. Previous caregivers trimmed the feathers so as to deny them flight. One day a raven named Thor climbed up some scaffolding. When Skaife reached out to capture him from the heights, Thor leapt but did not soar and landed with a thud.
“He died in my arms,” the ravenmaster said.
After that, Skaife vowed to trim as little as possible. He calls it “feather management,” just a snip, more in the long warm days of summer and less in the cold dark winter.
The Tower has served as fortress, palace, prison, home of the Royal Mint and Royal Armory, and the storehouse of the Crown Jewels. At one point, it contained a menagerie, with elephants, bears and baboons. Back then, as today, the Yeoman Warders were touts. There was a few pence to made in telling tall tales — about the gallows and queens on the chopping block and ravens, too.
Skaife understands this well. “I sometimes think that the Tower is just a vast storehouse of the human imagination,” he observed, “and the ravens are its guardians.”