Town Raven

Town Raven
In flight

ITS A DIARY !

This is a diary, or rather, field notes written up each day, with the latest entry at the top.

To get the full story, start at the bottom entry in the archive, and read upwards.
Then read the current diary entries from the bottom up as well.


Once you've got the full story, just visit and read the new story for the day!

Enjoy!

Location Map

Location Map
This shows where we walk and meet the ravens
The yellow and pink squiggly lines are two walks we take. The yellow one is the one we usually do. The squigglyness indicates how Madame visits her several important sniffing check-points!
We stop several times to feed the ravens, and you can see where they come from.

If you right-click on the image and open it in a new tab, you can then zoom in to see more details.

Friday 20 November 2009

Nov 20th


Oh joy! 
My ravens were back today - my hope was not misplaced.

Mind - I was very apprehensive. I heard only one raven call before we left the house, but many seagull screams. We left at the slightly later time of 7.45 a.m. It was dry and felt much milder than the last couple of days, because the winds had dropped overnight. Instead of storms we had a nice breeze. It was however quite overcast.

One lone raven was on the ground in the very first field we come to from the house. There were no calls.

As we got to the big field, one was sitting in a tree lining the footpath - and he did croak. This could have been the one we saw in the other field - he'd gone, I looked back to check. We then heard some more calls in the distance, coming from the direction of the ancient quarries at the boundary of Llandaff Fields.
We walked up, playing with the ball, but saw no ravens anywhere.

But then!
My ravens appeared, on the ground of the top of the big field. They were fine with Madame rushing up to them - and they did pick up the scraps I fed them. My bold raven was his usual self, coming towards me up to about three feet away, and he again grabbed the scraps I threw for the timid raven. He flew into on tree at the spinney as we crossed into the ravens field.

Both came to get more scraps while we walked to the enclosure - it was all as it used to be. I was so happy! And then this happened:
Heavy breathing behind me - and Bas had turned up, jumping up to try and lick my face! He then proceeded to chase the ravens, who flapped off for a few yards but did not fly into the trees.

Karen and I walked to the enclosure to do the usual feeding routine. Madame was on her lead, Bas was rushing about. The ravens, inside the enclosure, were a bit disturbed by this, and waited for us to walk away, for about ten yards, before they picked up the scraps. 
Interesting, that.
Karen then put Bas on his lead, which seemed to make the ravens less fearful.

The bold one followed us for a bit - but gave up when we walked round the spinney the 'no-more-food'-way.

I am so glad they came again, today. 
I don't know who the two ravens were yesterday. I assume they cannot have been 'mine', because I cannot imagine that they'd lose their fear, caused by the flash from my camera, just overnight.

Can't wait for tomorrow!

3 comments:

paladin3001 said...

Hi yma. Got a question for you. What type of camera are you using?

yma said...

Its an Olympus mu, 10 megapixels, 5 x optical zoom.

I use Picasa for the downloads and the minor adjustments. Having 'learned' photography the old-fashioned way, before digital, its a doddle. And of course this meshes very well with using the Picasa web album - uploads are dead easy and fast.

Most of the photos have been cropped, and the blog software then shrinks them to size.

Nothing to do with personal technical expertise - which I don't have!

paladin3001 said...

Okay, sorry about the length in getting back to you. You might want to play with some settings to avoid flash. Increase the ISO settings and possibly with your white balance. There's also a few other tricks you might want to try as well. A good idea is to play around at sunset if you aren't walking Madame. Of course I am not an expert, just an amateur that's played around with stuff like this.

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