There’s something about ravens, and probably with good reason. Birds of North America notes that they are “geographically and ecologically one of the most widespread naturally occurring birds in the world.” Edgar Allan Poe did not invent the mystique of the raven with his dark poem. He was simply adding to a fascination with the species that surely began when our species was grappling with saber-toothed tigers and the loser’s remains were scavenged by his “ominous bird of yore.” Ravens have been with us, all of us, everywhere but the tropics, since the beginning.
Among all of man’s fellow travelers, only owls and dragonflies have evoked such wide-ranging emotions as ravens—wisdom and trickery, creation and death, the incredible lightness of being and the suffocating weight of mortality. Perhaps it’s the black plumage. My late birding mentor, Pat Beall, confided in me that she hoped, if it were possible, to come back for a second lifetime in the form of a raven—intelligent and seemingly always at play was her interpretation of the ebony species.
Ornithologically speaking, ravens are passerines, not raptors—“rapere” the Latin for “seize”—but they are known to take ducks and gulls in flight, and other passerines from their nests. They are the ultimate avian opportunists. If you take a road trip anywhere in the West, a raven will be your first sighting of the day, flying first light, following the highways, patrolling for the previous night’s road kill, a major component of nature’s black clad sanitation service.
My two most memorable raven sightings are these: a single raven in a parking lot in Yellowstone hopping onto an unattended snowmobile’s leather saddlebags, unfastening a buckle with its beak, dumping out the contents, then sorting through it before flying off with beef jerky which it had extracted from the cellophane wrapping; a pair along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon playing catch, “vertically,” with a twig, the higher one dropping it, then swooping below the lower one which would catch and then drop it again, “fallfrogging” as it were under one another and down a cliff face until finally locking talons and cartwheeling out of sight toward the river. Intelligence and play.
Though probably unacceptable to the Catholic Church in which I was raised, always a dream of mine has been that my corpse be placed upon a platform atop a primitive scaffolding of Lodgepole Pine raised above the surrounding forest to await its discovery by the undertakers in black. Some Native American tribes disposed of their dead this way, understanding far better than us our oneness with nature and the universe, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.