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.

Monday 11 January 2010

Jan 11th


It was another cold morning. The sky was still so dark when we left the house at 7.45 a.m., visibility was very bad. 
This was due to the thick cover of cloud, which hasn't moved all day. 
Some wet stuff came down from those clouds - snow, rain, sleet? Who knows - it was far too intermittent to make out. But the damp cold was awful!

We had heard the ravens call much earlier, and as soon as we go to the first field, we heard them again, as if they were announcing our arrival. More calls, from the Pontcanna Fields side as we walked up the big field - Madame ecstatically rolling in the snow ever so often.

At the top of the big field, one, then the second raven came to the ground, from the spinney - and as yesterday, the second young pair soon arrived from the quarry side. I had lots of scraps for them, but even so, there was one almighty scuffle between them, one from each pair really laying into each other. It was plain competition for one little scrap - the other two ravens didn't get involved. 

My young pair is less skittish when Madame is off the lead, and one of them didn't even budge when she walked past him to get the scrap he'd overlooked. 
Then, the single raven turned up as well, waiting in the distance until I went towards him and threw him a scrap - he then hopped closer, but it was too dark to see if this was my bold raven.

While I was doing this, the other four squawked loudly behind my back. They had hopped quite close, to about a couple of yards, so they got more food.

Then Bas turned up and the quarry ravens took off immediately, as did the single raven. My young pair didn't seem to mind, one of them calmly swallowed the last scrap, standing on the ground, while Bas walked past him - just a yard away.

We went back home after all the food had gone - too cold for a longer outing! 
The scraps I had put out in the back garden had all been eaten by nightfall yesterday - but looking at the footprints, it probably went into some blackbirds or robins, not into a raven.

Heavy snow forecast for the night and tomorrow - if not snow, then rain and ice. Never mind, the socks-over-boots trick works fine, so we'll go out: the ravens will get their food!

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