An unkind conspiracy against ravens?

THERE are certain bird calls that have an evocative, even a thrilling, effect on most people. I certainly react to the sound of migrating wild geese honking on the wing, to a cuckoo calling in the spring and to the wild music of whooper swans bouncing off the water in deep winter.

Another bird call that stops me in my tracks is the deep croak of a raven. But if this is an evocative sound what does it evoke? For me it brings back memories of days when I’ve hiked high into the mountains and the bird’s call has echoed off a precipice. Or a time when I lived close to the sea and ravens sailed on the up-currents over the cliffs.

Ravens like cliffs and precipices and these are their preferred nesting sites. Now I live in a flat part of the midlands where, apart from the odd quarry, we have no cliffs — but we do have ravens in steadily increasing numbers.

Midland ravens have learned to nest in trees, but they insist on

very tall trees. Their stronghold is the old estate woodlands where, over the centuries, generations of landlords collected and planted the exotic conifers that are now mature and lofty. They nest in these and spend quite a bit of the day sitting atop the tallest ones, presumably scanning the ground for anything edible, and giving the occasional territorial croak.

In Donadea Forest in Co Kildare, they’re particularly fond of the half dozen or so wellingtonias, or giant redwoods. In Oak Park in Co Carlow, They favour some large old specimens of sitka spruce.

Ravens were once a rare bird in Ireland. Persecution by gamekeepers and farmers brought them close to extinction. The Victorians had a passion for inventing collective nouns for wild birds and animals and ravens were so unpopular that the two collective nouns they acquired were “an unkindness” and “a conspiracy”.

This was quite unfair. Ravens are crows, the largest members of the crow family. Crows are not predators: they have neither the talons nor the beaks for the job. They do eat quite a lot of carrion, which means they perform a useful clean-up function in the countryside, and they are opportunistic, which extends to eating pheasant, grouse or duck eggs if they come across a nest. But beyond that they are rather benign.

Their unpopularity stemmed from the fact that a hill farmer coming across one feeding on a dead lamb would assume that it had killed the lamb. But a raven is physically incapable of killing a lamb — this has actually been proved experimentally with tame ravens. The bird was merely disposing of the carcass.

Unfortunately the bird’s liking for carrion made it particularly susceptible to the poisoned baits left out for foxes.

And there may be something more: There is a very old tradition common to several cultures that ravens are birds of ill-omen. It seems likely that this stems from the raven’s habit of visiting battle fields the morning after and feeding on human corpses. There are some references to this in early Irish mythology.

Today we live in more enlightened times and ravens have benefited from this. There are now between 3,500 and 4,000 breeding pairs in the country and the numbers are increasing. A man told me the other day he saw one perching on the spire of a church in the middle of Carlow town. This is a far cry from the days when you had to go to our most remote wilderness areas to spot a great crow with a wedge-shaped tail and a sonorous croak.

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