WILDLIFE WEDNESDAY: The Genius Bird We Hate to Love
Are these birds stark raven bad?
Vans, RVs, and SUVs crowded the Twin Tanks parking lot. Families dragged back from hiking to Heart Rock on a hot summer morning, the wind snatching snack wrappers from their hands. We had been poking around Twin Tanks looking for tadpoles and triops after a recent monsoon rain. I was glad I had an extra water bottle in the car—but what was a half-eaten orange doing on the roof?
Who was the asshole who left their trash on my car? I saw a pair of ravens hopping around the parking lot keeping their eyes out for dropped morsels. Then I noticed a splash of white poop on the windshield. Culprits identified! I swear I heard them snickering.
An unkindness of juvenile ravens checks out the water dish.
Less benign than the shredded orange was the broken shell of a hatchling tortoise I found along the Boy Scout Trail, a hole probably drilled by a raven’s powerful beak.
I admire ravens for their intelligence and playfulness—during a presentation I’ve long forgotten, I watched a group of young ravens roll and tumble in air streaming from the vent of a Pasadena office building and wished I could do that too. Chris Clarke tells an enchanting story of one raven tricking a group of gulls out of a prized snack, demonstrating peak bird braininess.
But ravens also prey on young desert tortoises, losses the population of endangered reptiles can’t afford to bear. It’s not the ravens’ fault—it’s ours. We’ve created opportunities for them to thrive on our garbage and roadkill. The power lines we’ve strung across the desert provide spots for ravens to roost, nest and linger in places they once flew through.
Some novel ideas have been tried for discouraging ravens, including Hardshell Labs Techno Tort, which lures ravens to feed on a robotic hatchling tortoise and deters them with a puff of artificial grape flavoring, which the birds hate, training them to stay away.
Better yet, more than 500 utility poles have recently been removed from the Mojave National Preserve, taking away prime raven nest sites in tortoise country. Ravens have no shortage of other places to build their nests. Here in Twentynine Palms, placing utilities for commercial buildings underground per city code helps eliminate some of these nesting spots, especially near the national park boundary.
Although I am Team Tortoise, I still enjoy watching the mated pair of ravens that claim our yard as their territory. In the spring, the (mostly) monogamous couple soar together with a whoosh of their wings and dare each other to great heights. Their fledglings whine that flying down from the top of that tree is just too scary, mom.
I can empathize with them panting with their beaks open in the deepest summer—ravens are here all year, and I appreciate their willingness to stick it out. Just don’t eat any baby tortoises, I tell them, but when has a raven ever listened to a human?
What do you think? Are ravens beautiful and inspiring? or are they mischievous tricksters? Or are they “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous birds of yore?”1
You recognize Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” of course.
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Ravens are the black bears of the sky. Like bears, they are are simply part of the ecosystem in a natural environment, but when humans encroach, they are high enough on the food chain that they benefit from our wasteful ways, while other, lower, species suffer, and they also become a ‘nuisance’ animal to us humans. So in a better world, where their prime delicacy is plentiful, and they have never met a candy wrapper, they are sweet and smart.