Why you see — and hear — more ravens in Conn.
SCREAM!!! SHRIEK!!! SCREEEEAM !!!!
This is the bloody-murder racket I heard on a Sunday morning two week ago when I went out for the Sunday papers. Such a cacophony!!! It lasted two or three minutes, nonstop. Then I heard a familiar croak and the noise abated. For a while.
What I heard that morning, and several days to follow, were fledgling ravens demanding food, RIGHT NOW!!! The comforting croaking that followed were
the adult ravens, supplying them with a meal and saying “Hush.’’
I have seen ravens flying over my house, in ones and two, and heard their deepthroated vocalizing. But the fledgling noise meant they were nesting nearby and had babies.
I have loved ravens as a real bird — not just Edgar Allen Poe doleful nevermorer — since I saw and heard one in Nova Scotia in the 1970s. I’ve seen them in Alaska and Arizona and increasingly in Connecticut. Having them nest nearby made me happy.
Then one day, I heard the now familiar screaming and croaking. Then, I looked up and saw three black birds, soaring high and beautiful across the sky. It’s been noticeably quieter ever since..
This noisy scene has been playing out elsewhere in Connecticut. Ravens have figured out they can live with us.
“I have a friend in Woodbury who’s heard them,” said Angela Dimmitt of New Milford, president of the Western Connecticut Bird Club. “This is the time.”
Ken Elkins, community conservation manager for Audubon Connecticut, was taking a group of grammar school students on a bird call listening tour at the Bent of the River nature center in Southbury recently when a raven fledgling party broke out.
“We were listening for the noise chimney swifts make in the air,” Elkins said. “Then we heard ravens.’’
“People ask us ‘Was something being killed? Was it a monkey?’” said Cathy Hagadorn, executive director of Deer Pond Farm, the nature center in Sherman owned by the Connecticut Audubon Society. “But take a moment and listen. It’s ‘Mom! Mom! I’m hungry!’”
Two or three decades ago, almost nobody heard that particular plea in the state. There were almost no common ravens here to make them. Elkins said the 1980 Connecticut Bird Atlas survey found only a handful of them in the state.
But in the intervening 30 years, ravens have returned.
“They’ve come down from the north and from the west,” said Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society. “By now, they’re just here.”
“When they first started returning, people thought they’d stay in the Litchfield Hills, in the forest,” Elkins said. But now you see them along the shoreline.”
“You can find them in Greenwich, in Bridgeport,” Comins said.
There are reasons for this. Ravens are omnivores. They eat almost anything — bugs, frogs, bird eggs, berries, carrion and garbage. With people leaving lots of food in their wake, ravens are just taking advantage of our wastefulness.
They are also supremely adaptable. They live in the desert and the Arctic tundra, in the mountains and along the oceans. They build their bulky nests high in trees, on cliff ledges and human structures.
And they are very smart and very curious, able to analyze new objects and new situations. Hagadorn said she once watched a raven pick up a turkey feather, then study the feather in detail, walking around it, eyeing it, before deciding it was of nothing worth bothering about and flying away.
They are — rare among birds — playful. People have observed airborne ravens doing barrel rolls and loopde-loops and flying upside down. They’ve been seen sliding down snow banks. Play is always a sign of intelligence.
They also mature slowly, not mating until they’re two or three years old. But if they escape predation when young, they can be longlived, flying around for a decade or more.
Elkins said that unlike a lot of other hard-wired birds, ravens learn from their parents what’s good to eat and what’s not, what’s safe and what’s dangerous. Once they leave the family group, they’re mostly solitary until they mate. Then they travel in tandem.
They are also unusually vocal. They don’t sing. But they make a variety of croaks and clucks and gurgles. They’re good mimics.
Which, Hagadorn said, is why us humans need to listen to ravens, not just see them.
“Listen with an open ear and an open heart,” she said. “There’s always a story to hear with ravens.”