P. 149 Ravens, as with other corvids, are notorious for hiding things. Because the birds lack a sense of smell, instead they memorise the exact locations of where they have buried their food in order to return to it later. Ravens are also master thieves, able to map out the patches of rival birds and dig up their caches. A 2003 experiment in the US by Bernd Heinrich discovered that when surrounded by competitors, ravens will wait until the attention of their rivals is distracted, before planting their own caches.
“It is not only food that ravens steal and secrete… the writer Truman Capote was making pioneering observations of his own pet raven, Lola. In his 1964 essay of the same name, Capote describes how he tricked Lola into showing him where she kept her treasures – after his bird stole the false teeth of an elderly guest staying in his Sicilian mountainside home. … When the teeth vanished, Capote placed his gold ring – which he had watched the raven greedily covt – on the kitchen table after lunch one afternoon and hid behind the door. The moment Lola presumed she wasn’t being watched she stopped snaffling up crumbs from the table, snatched the ring and waddled out of the dining room and down a hall into the library. From there she hopped up on a chair and on to the bookshelves, disappearing into a gap obscured by The Complete Jane Austen. Capote lists the items tretrieved from the raven’s cache: “the long-lost keys to my car, a mass of paper money, old letters, my best cufflinks, rubber bands, yards of string, the first page of a short story, an American penny, a dry rose, a crystal button..” and, of course, the purloined dentures of his house guest.”
P. 155 the raven roost at Newborough Forest on the Welsh island of Anglesey … furst started their nightly gatherings here in the 1990s and soon began to arrive in such numbers that Newborough was, at one point, considered the largest roost in the world. On some evenings, it exceeded 2,000 birds. That mantle has since passed to a roost in Idahoon steel pylons supporting 711km of power cable along the Snake River… during the cold months, vast numbers arriv ehere from all over North Wales, England, Scotland, and perhaps even across the Irish Sea – an epic journey that calls into question their supposed reluctance to cross large bodies of waer. They come to Anglesey as juveniles and lone adults attracted by all the same possibilities that prompt humans to leave their homes and travel to foreign lands: love, security and survival.”
P. 157 The trees were planted here between 1947 and 1965, covering a desert landscape of loose-blown sand dunes. Some 700 years ago a particularly fierce storm carried the sand so far inland that farmers were buried inside their cottages.”
P. 167
“Watson is particularly interested in the way humans process the sound of the raven. He calls this the notion of temporal resolution, the speed at which information is assimilated by our brains. The raven, like other birds, processes sound roughly twice as fast as humans are capable of. “We have to slow it down before we can even begin to understand the complexity of it,” Watson says.
P. 186
In a 1962 study of the breeding densities of ravens and peregrines, the ecologist Derek Ratcliffe noted a “proximity tolerance” limit between adjacent nesting pairs. Famously, this tolerance is often pushed to the point of downright hostility.”
P. 189
Ravens in Yorkshire “they protect their clutches against such cold weather by lining their nests with sheep’s wool and laying the eggs deep within them. The female normally incubates the eggs for about 21 days before they hatch. Ravens can lay four or six eggs – quite large cluches relative to most birds – and fledge about three young. The family then stays together until early summer, the young ravens learning to fly off the quarry edges, before they disperse to join flocks of other juvenile ravens. When the young have left, the adult pair will begin securing their territory before the next breeding season.”
P. 204 Charles Waterton “travelled widely as a young man in the jungles of Guyana, making his name in 19th-century British society as a gentleman explorer and conservationist. He managed to cheat death countless times during his travels and returned – wracked with dengue fever and malaria – to his inherited 300 acres, where he established Britain’s first protected nature reserve. While the Industrial Revolution boomed in coal country all around him, poisoning rivers, digging mines and felling woodland in the name of commerce. Waterton erected a vast three-mile long and 4metre high wall around his estate… completed in 1826. Everything inside of it he devoted to the preservation of animals.”
P. 208
The progress of man is measured out in the species we have laid waste to. When the ice sheets melted across BRitain around 10,000 years ago, Mesolithic hunter gatherers set out across these virgin lands with spear, bow and arrow in hand. They killed auroch, wolf, lynx, brown bear, wild boar, beaver and eld, which were all once prolific across the great forests and wildwoods. The UK’s bison, elk and brown bear were wiped out by 500AD, and the last wild wolf in Britain was supposedly killed by a Highland chief called Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, in 1685. Our appetite for destruction kept the ravens close. They knew that human footsteps would always lead to blood. Yet in the centuries that followed, our attention turned to ravens themselves.
The Preservation of Grain Act passed in 1532 by Henry VIII and strengthened by Elizabeth I in 1566, made it compulsory for every man, woman and child to kill as many creatures as possible that appeared on an official list of ‘vermin’, in order to protect crops and liverstock. Bounties for the bodies of vermin were administered by churchwardens. One could expect to be paid 4 pence for bringing the head of a raven, kite or jay. Kingfishers were valued at one pence a head; so to a clutch of six young crows. “
P. 209
By the end of the 17th century, the raven had already been driven from the lowlands of England and Wales. The methods used by trappers included lime sticks (placed around the corpse of an animal which meant the ravens became stuck.” and smearing corpses with nux vomica, the tosic seed of an East Indian tree from which strychnine is derived.”
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