Country Mouse

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EMITTING a loud cronk as it soared majestically over my head, with an unidentified morsel of prey clasped in its flint-axe-shaped beak, I wondered momentarily where the mighty raven might be heading.

I see this intimidating-looking bird most days when walking my labrador in the field behind our house. The largest of the crow family—and, indeed, all passerines—ravens (and carrion crows) are known in Scotland as corbies, a term that’s believed to derive from the 15th-century French word corbin. Hearing that powerful, croaking call took me back to where we used to live in Dumfriesshire, on the opposite side of the valley to a cottage aptly called Cronksbank, after the corvids that flocked to the bleak hillside behind it.

I couldn’t see what my Dorset/somerset-based raven was about to consume for its breakfast, but Corvus corax survives on an enormous variety of food that one commentator has described as ranging ‘from a worm to a whale’. They can make do with vegetation, but are also fond of live prey, from rats, rabbits and hedgehogs to moles, stoats, ducks and pipits, as well as birds’ eggs.

However, for its last supper, there’s no doubt that the raven, like all of its Corvidae brethren, would opt for carrion every time. PL