Ravens do not generally hang around in my neighborhood, here in northwest Washington, D.C.
The common raven lives in a lot of places – much of Europe and Asia; most of Canada, the western U.S. and Mexico; south into Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. According to the map on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Common Raven web page, a finger of the bird’s range reaches down into Appalachia. Indeed, the last one I saw was a couple of years ago, a few hours to the west, in West Virginia, being chased by crows above the treetops.
The most obvious difference between a raven and a crow is size. Ravens are big. Really big. A good two feet long, the guide book tells me. Compare that to just 17.5 inches for the American crow, which is common around here.
So the other day I was standing on a metro platform, and I spotted a big bird flying in the distance. But then it got close enough so I could see that it was black, and I thought raven, but then I thought, “ugh, Helen, it’s just a crow, crows are big.” It was flying in an odd way, though – swooping and soaring – and, I realized, it was calling, an odd pair of croaks. Part of me was saying “you’ve just forgotten what crows sounds like,” but the other part of me whipped out my phone and started the Merlin app. It confirmed: raven.
A raven! Flying over my neighborhood!
A few years ago I learned how to detect a fish crow. It looks almost exactly the same as an American crow, but its voice sounds different. Now that I know their call, I’ve realized that fish crows are pretty common around here. And, on Monday, there I was, using sound to recognize another corvid in my neighborhood.
As I learn to recognize their voices, that whole amorphous blob of big black birds is differentiating into individual species.
I think I had actually seen the raven a few days before. I looked out of my window and saw a huge black bird winging its way over the construction site, but I dismissed my instinct – it’s just a crow, Helen. I got my guidebook off the shelf in the bedroom. Ravens have a 53-inch wingspan – that’s more than four feet. It wasn’t that big. Ravens don’t live here.
Except, apparently, they do.
Photo: Screenshot of the recording I made and Merlin’s ID
Just this past September, after a visit back home to Charm City, I wrote, “We saw no ravens here—football team notwithstanding, they can be found no closer to Baltimore than the mountains of western Maryland.” I should have been less categorical. After all, it was none other than Roger Tory Peterson who reminded us, “Birds have wings, and they do things.”
As for crows, I was taught to just ask them: “Hey, are you an American crow?” If the reply is a nasal “Uh-uh”, then what you have is a fish crow.
Some ravens roosting and chatting around my home in Prescott, Arizonaradio aporee ::: maps – neoscenes: ravens coming home
Some ravens roosting and chatting around my home in Prescott, Arizona :: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=21125&m=satellite