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.

Sunday 17 January 2010

Sunday, Jan 17th:


We did go out together this morning. No snow, no wind to speak off, no drizzle - and while not exactly balmy, it was not cold. We actually saw a hint of dawn.

Earlier, before we got out at 7.50 a.m., we had heard the ravens call as if totally outraged. To my great astonishment, some of the rubbish bags were being collected, thus disturbing the early morning ravens raid on the ripped food bags. I was told by a neighbour, who works nights, that he'd seen the tracks of urban foxes who'd ripped open those food bags.

Once in Llandaff Fields, we heard some raven calls from Pontcanna Fields, but did not see any ravens anywhere. 
We walked to the ravens field - Madame on her lead - and once there, two ravens swooped in from the trees at the back wall, the boundary to the allotments.

It was my bold pair! 
They landed and walked up to us, facing us frontally. again, the bold one scoffed as much as he could get before taking off to hide his food. His companion patiently waited - and then flew off to hide the two, never more than three, pieces of scraps she got. 
The bold raven easily takes four or five.

This time, he also, twice, did not fly to the far end of the ravens field, but made two and three holes - some surely decoy holes, as described by Bernd Heinrich - just a couple of yards away from me, not bothering to fly away.

The only time both started to get skittish was when they were in the enclosure and a single seagull (black-headed gull) kept circling quite low over us all. It went away after a few minutes, I did not throw any food while it was circling. 

The bold raven, separated from us by the enclosure fence, came to within a couple of feet of me - but Madame's collie stare, that close up, did disconcert him a bit.

We went back the 'more food' way, both following us, and the bold raven actually swooping to the ground under the trees next to the spinney and hopping after us, across the footpath!

Once there, while still feeding them, the quarry pair turned up. They kept well away, and didn't call today. I gave them scraps when the bold pair, separately, had gone to hide their scraps. So no dust-up between them today.

Worth noting: the companion of the bold raven fluffs up her head feathers when she is alone and the quarry pair is around.

As it will stay reasonably mild tomorrow, we'll try and go out again, depending on how Madame feels.

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