Magpie Picks

Posted on an office door next to the women's bathroom at the CVS Pharmacy in Tiburon, CA. A soulmate works here!

I've been reading about ravens in this book called Mind of the Raven. Fascinating, albeit the writer (a professor and biologist) is REALLY into details. He's geeky-cool though, spends a lot of time in an isolated cabin in Maine and has raised several ravens from birth so he can observe their behavior.

Takeaways from a non-scientist reader (I'm about a third into the book):

1) they don't always mate for life
2) they choose raven friends in addition to their partner, and hang out with them to have fun
3) fun can consist of flying in perfect unison with their wings nearly touching, or doing corkscrew-like flying descents (think Top Gun), and speaking of...
4) they can fly as high as an airplane
5) they often fly to different states and come back to the exact same spot several months or even several years later
6) they're unpredictable and quite variable in their preferences and behaviors
7) over time, those preferences and behaviors can change, making it difficult to document consistent patterns
8) they are the shiest and most skitterish of all birds

Now my quest is to find a raven, or differentiate one from among the multitude of crows who live in these parts, and observe it regularly, just to see...what makes them tick?