Watching the ravens: amazing. Meeting the Ravenmaster: fabulous. Watching the ravens and tourists interact: priceless. We were a bit jet lagged for our Tower trip (first morning in the UK) and I was still trying to figure out how to use my new, tiny, and infinitely complicated, travel camera. But with only two days in …
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Raven Games March 14 2019, 0 Comments
I was worried that I wasn’t going to get well soon enough to go up on the mountains again this winter. Luckily, it’s been snowing like crazy up there (as well as in the city!) and I finally started to feel better earlier this week. Yesterday we headed up to Mount Seymour for a short …
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How can you tell if it’s a crow or a raven? This is a question that often comes up in my email and social media. There are a lot of excellent resources to help out with this (more on these later) — but I thought I’d try my hand at the explanation too, based …
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Special Days April 25 2018, 0 Comments
Some days there are ravens. Some days, there are even mountain bluebirds. When such things miraculously appear in my own urban neighbourhood I tend to (if at all possible) just drop everything and follow them. I’ve been ridiculously lucky for the past two weekends. It was the raven the weekend before last. She hung around …
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It’s that time of year again. Most of the local crows seem to have suddenly become enrolled in some sort of corvid witness protection program. The normally gregarious garden visitors, and dog-walk-followers, are suddenly either absent altogether, or shifty and secretive. It’s nesting time, and I’m resigned to not seeing so much of Marvin and …
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Cloud Mystery September 12 2017, 0 Comments
The clouds this morning made me really, really happy. I was so happy, that I had to question what it was about them that made me feel so darn chipper. Perhaps is because they made such a spectacular change from skies that have been either blue and cloudless or filled with sepia smoke for the …
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Crows and ravens are generally (and understandably) described as birds with black plumage. It is their darkness that allows them to grace the sky with such striking calligraphy. Formal sentences composed on wires; more fluid, improvisational characters when taking to the air. But it’s so much more complicated, and beautiful, than that. Crow and raven feathers are …
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Plot Twist March 08 2016, 0 Comments
Sometimes you start reading a book, and it takes you somewhere you had no idea you were going. I have a weakness for vintage natural history books, so I was quite thrilled to find this treasure on the shelves of a used bookstore in Nanaimo a while ago. I was immediately taken with the lovely …
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I love colour. I really do love colour. But there is something very beautiful in a landscape stripped down to shades of black and white. Stark and simple. Here’s a little photo essay on a lovely world almost devoid of colour.
Ghost Raven January 20 2016, 0 Comments
Whenever I go up into the mountains I’m hoping to see ravens. They are actually part of my fitness program. If I ever feel like just sitting all day at the computer, I remind myself that if I don’t keep my knees in working order, I won’t be able to get up those mountains and …
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I always love to see crows, but I must admit I’m always a bit sad to see them typecast as harbingers of death and all things spooky, especially at Halloween. My new “red sky crow” pendant would seem, at first blush, to be part of the problem. But, I’d like people who wear it to know …
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Bundled in my stylish plaid dressing gown, I climbed to the top deck of our house first thing this morning to participate in the annual Great Backyard Bird Count. As I surveyed a sea of fog, things did not look promising. I could hear a lot of frantic crow activity, although it was hard to …
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I have concluded that Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem, The Raven, is nothing more than an unfortunate inter-species misunderstanding. Let me explain … I was thinking of calling this new crow portrait “Nevermore”. Before making my final decision, I decided to reread the famous poem that has forever linked ravens with the word “nevermore”. The …
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In a competition judged on cuteness and goofiness, I would have said that crow babies would be the hands-down winners. Until, that is, I came across baby ravens. They are like giant baby crows — with impossibly large feet. This is a series of images in which I’m exploring beauty of these birds in their urban setting. Crows and their …
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One evening I was leaving Granville Island after a day at the market. Daydreaming as I wandered back to where I’d parked, it took me a few moments to realize that I was experiencing an audio disconnect. My ears were hearing ancient forest soundtrack, but I was actually under the mighty iron girders of the …
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Yowza!! Major excitement in the neighbourhood this morning. The crows are pretty noisy at this time of year anyway. They’ve mostly given up dive-bombing pedestrians in our neighbourhood now that the babies are out of the nest. The young ones are pretty mobile and not so much in need of ferocious parental protection now. Still, there’s a lot of raucous …
Continue reading Consternation in the ‘Hood
