Tom and I were picnicking in Yellowstone National Park when we were joined by a big black bird, a raven with menacing beak and hunched shoulders. It flew to a nearby tree and watched intently as we fished out the crackers, sliced thick slabs of Munster cheese from a block, and poured milk into our cups. It seemed, you know, just a bit too close. Still, we hovered over our lunch and felt like we had command of the situation until Tom got up from the table to look for napkins in the opened trunk. He couldn’t find them.
I got up to help him and in that split second when my eyes were elsewhere, the raven swooped it, nabbed the entire block of Munster cheese and flew away.
I think of that raven each time I hear the resident raven croaking from the farmland just beyond our house in Center City, of how I was outwitted by a bird. Ravens are common in northern Minnesota, but Chisago County is at the southern edge of its range. The Minnesota Breeding Bird Atlas, completed a few years ago, considered them “probable breeders” in Chisago County, but there was no positive identification of a nest.
This classification is a marked change from when T. S. Roberts wrote The Birds of Minnesota in 1932. Roberts considered the raven “a disappearing bird” headed for extinction in the state. They had once been common in the many logging camps in northern Minnesota during the great deforestation, but since the closing of the camps, were increasingly rare. He gave no reason for the decline, but the MNBBA suggests that human persecution in the form of shooting, poisoning, and trapping; and the conversion of forest to agricultural land and urbanization played a role.
However, Minnesota ornithologist Bob Janssen has noted the raven’s come-back, and the gradual expansion of its range, first westward, and then southward since the 1950s. Now considered a common northern bird, it still seems to prefer forested areas to nest in, and also, conversely, human settlements.
Ravens are exceptionally smart. They are noted problem solvers, a characteristic that has been attributed to the fact that they feed on carrion side by side with some ferocious predators: wolves. Ravens pair up between two and four years of age and mate for life. Their nests are comprised of sticks and may be as big as five feet across and two feet high. The female lays 3-7 eggs and incubates them for 20-25 days. Nestlings remain in the nest 28-50 days.
Like their cousins, the crows, ravens are good mimics. One bird was taught as a hatchling to croak “Nevermore.”
University of Vermont zoologist Bernd Heinrich, attracted to ravens since his childhood in Germany, has written a comprehensive book on these beguiling birds, Mind of the Raven: investigations and adventures with Wolf-birds. He relates his experience with semi-tame ravens and his observations of their capabilities. The book is weighty, both figuratively and literally, but it is well worth the trouble to have on your shelf, to dip in and out of for a pleasurable evening’s read. The world will seem more alive to you, with ravens in it.
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