Why we should rave about ravens

MANY residents of my West Cork village consider it a rare privilege to have ravens nesting close by.

Big, wild birds, enshrined in history and legend, their presence demonstrates the unspoiled nature of our surroundings.

Since time immemorial, a pair has nested on the same local cliff-face. In late April, when the Courtmacsherry woods are carpeted in bluebells and ramsons, the fledglings are ready to fly.

This year tragedy befell them. How it happened is a mystery. The hope is they will nest again next year. Nature’s continuity plays an important role in our equilibrium. Governments and religions may fail, but nature abides; the bluebells, the ramsons, the ravens. We would be diminished by their absence. Their re-emergence reassures us.

I’ve watched the ravens’ nest for years. Having been abroad, it was St Patrick’s Day before I took my first cliff walk to see them. Already, small, pink hatchlings were squirming in the nest.

A month later, these tiny creatures had grown into well-feathered, jackdaw-sized birds, as tightly packed into the nest as sardines in a tin. It was difficult to know how many there were but, in a magic moment, a parent arrived overhead and uttered a harsh call. Immediately four heads, with open red gapes, shot up but the adult had spotted me, and didn’t fly down. However, in my blurred photo, taken on Monday, Apr 14, four wide-open beaks are clearly visible.

On the following day, the fledglings were as robust as usual but on the Thursday evening, Kevin and Beth Hanly, keen observers of the nest over decades, thought them to be unusually motionless. When a parent flew overhead carrying food in its beak, the nestlings didn’t react. Peter Wolstenholme, a birding expert, thought they might simply have been sleeping after a heavy meal.

However, Mr Hanly, concerned that harm might have befallen them, visited the site next morning armed with his ‘best binoculars’. He saw ” ... the nest in fritters and the birds upside down, with one hanging over the side”. At 11.30am, he met his friend, a local publican who told him that he already knew the bad news having been out there earlier. However, he saw only one dead fledgling, half-fallen from the nest.

That evening there was much speculation about the ravens amongst those gathered in the Anchor Bar for an end-of-the-week pint before dinner. Were the clutch all dead? How could it have happened? One man said he had seen a rat in the nest. This augured ill. No rat would have come near if the parents were around; it might well be seized and become dinner.

On the Saturday morning, two members of the raven quorum, investigating the scene with binoculars, reported three dead fledglings. I took a photo later that day. It shows two bodies, bloody and disembowelled, on the broken nest. The adult birds weren’t to be seen.

What could have happened? Were the chicks, indeed, dead when Hanly saw them on the Thursday evening? Could the parents have taken food from a poisoned carcass laid out for foxes but eaten any themselves and thus survived? With the clutch dead, did they abandon the nest, and rats or blackback gulls scavenged the carcasses? Could some ignorant human have blasted the nest with buckshot? Unlikely. He would have had to take a long walk with a heavy gun solely for the purpose of murdering ‘sitting ducks’. Also, the nest would be at the limit of buckshot range. In addition, it was undamaged when the Hanlys saw it and the fledglings were not in disarray.

Was it a mink killing the clutch, then carrying off two chicks for its family and leaving the other two dead having retreated under attack by the parent birds with their formidable beaks and talons? But how could any four-legged creature, bar a rat, have reached the nest, so inaccessible under the overhang of sheer rock? Will the ravens ever nest again near Courtmacsherry? Is some of the wildness forever gone? The publican said that, on the Friday morning, he had seen two small, black crows in a field one field removed from where the parents lingered near the nest.

Perhaps two fledglings had flown before poison, shotgun or mink killed their siblings. It is usual for the young to disperse, field by field, day by day. The future may yet have been saved from the wreckage.