‘Like a player practising the deepest note for the Mozart clarinet concerto’
Araven sang (!) as it flew over the garden, just before Christmas. It was a faintly tuneful little toot, like a player practising the deepest note for the Mozart clarinet concerto. Skimming the oak crown it was close enough for me to see those tassled throat feathers that resemble a beard; also its pointed tail, longer than a crow’s, and big, buzzard-sized wings with their primary feathers splayed like fingers.
The days were spring-like, and fine, and unduly warm.
No wonder it felt the urge to advertise its territory.
Ravens breed early, with nest building starting on February 1, young hatching a month later, and the whole family flying away to the seaside at the end of April where they find the flotsam of dead fish, crabs, winkles and the jetsam of the human race to their advantage.
They are more scavengers than killers.
In Afghanistan I saw them competing with vultures in the mountains.
Here, they like nothing better than a dead sheep, and this caused outrage among farmers on the South Downs a century and more ago, who were sure they had killed one out of the flock.
Then a far more sinister activity was reported.
Ravens had been known to nest at the Devil’s Dyke, Brighton, since at least 1843, and in September and October 1876 they were frequently seen feeding in dense cover of gorse.
The ornithologist Booth then examined the place more thoroughly and found the skeleton of a man.
He was of no doubt what had attracted the ravens into such dense cover.
Then there was the famous case of the raven which frequently sat
on Suicide’s Leap, a jagged tooth of chalk jutting out over a 600ft drop somewhere along the towering ramparts, captured in the painting by Philip Rickman.
A male raven was seen here on this stepping stone to eternity as later as 1936, when it ‘tumbled’, as ravens do when displaying, and flew away, never to be seen again.
When a few pairs nested on the white cliffs in Queen Victoria’s reign, they sometimes had peregrine falcons as close neighbours, co-existing as equals.
But in 2008, ravens there were ejected by a pair of fulmar petrels, which are sea-birds resembling gulls.
Watchers for the Sussex Ornithological Society recorded the action.
A raven had built her nest in a cliffface crevice which the fulmars wanted for themselves, as they had enjoyed in 2007.
They repeatedly spat a foul-smelling oil from their throats, plastering the raven over her head and breast.
She tried to remove the filth by preening, while her mate dived on the sea birds in fury, but to no avail.
After ten days of constant attack, the fulmars won and evicted the ravens which remained in the area but without a family.