Ravens and crows and jays, oh my!

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 The title of this post is a play on words with famous line from the move The Wizard of Oz.  In the movie, Dorothy and her friends are following the Yellow Brick Road through a forest on their way to see the Wizard.  They don’t know what kind of wild animals are in the forest, and they become more and more afraid of being attacked.  As they become more afraid, they keep repeating the names of the animals that they are afraid of, “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”  “Oh my!” is something you say when you are surprised or worried.  It’s a lot of fun to repeat this line, because it has a really fun rhythm.  (Ask me in class about this some day.)  So this line is often repeated in the media (news, tv, articles, etc) , with different things substituted for the 3 scary animals.

But I must admit, this post is about crows and ravens but not really about jays.  I just included jays because I needed a 3^rd bird for the title and jays are related to ravens and crows.

I decided to write this post about ravens and crows because I came across this article in the BBC about how intelligent crows are.  It turns out there has been a lot written about crow intelligence.  The BBC has two more articles here and here, and the New York Times has a different article here.  The New York Times article is longer and harder to read than the BBC article.  It’s a very interesting story about a study at U.Washington which showed that crows are very good at recognizing individual human faces.  If the article is too difficult, you can see a video about this research (and more) here.  It’s fascinating to watch, and they speak pretty clearly and not too fast. The program is called "A Murder of Crows."  When it is used this way, "murder" is the more specific word for flock (group) of crows, although most people usually say "flock of crows."

Crows fascinate me.  Have you ever been asked, “If you could be any animal, what would you be?”  Many people say ‘dolphin.’  And I used to, too.  But then I remember watching, closely watching, a group of crows.  For a long time I thought of crows as nothing more than noisy, irritating birds.   Their “caw” is very loud and not particularly beautiful.  But when I watched a group of crows carefully, I was impressed by how social they were and how intelligent they seemed.  So now, if anybody asks me what animal I’d like to be, I tell them I’d like to be a crow.  What’s not to love about crows (except for their loud caw)?  They’re exceptionally  smart, they’re very social, and their shiny black feathers are so cool!

Similar to crows are ravens.  (Notice the inversion in that sentence?  Nice, eh?)  To me, ravens looks like very large crows on steroids (muscle-building drugs).  Here is short description of how you can tell crows and ravens apart.  

When I was a child, I visited the Tower of London, where, in addition to housing the Crown Jewels of England, they also keep several ravens.  It is said that if the ravens ever leave the Tower, England will fall.  I don’t know if they mean “fall” like “conquered by another country,” or if they mean simply that something bad will happen to England and it will stop existing.  Whether that is true or not remains to be seen, but the ravens at the Tower of London are a cultural icon, so it’s not surprising that the BBC wrote an article about them here.

Ravens and crows are very symbolic birds in many cultures.  Wikipedia has a very interesting article about them here.  Some people think they are scary, and in the US you sometimes see ravens on Halloween decorations.  A famous American author, Edgar Allan Poe, wrote a long poem called The Raven.  This poem is considered a classic of American Poetry.  Wikipedia summarizes it very well, saying:

"The Raven" is a narrative poem by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in January 1845. It is often noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere. It tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man's slow descent into madness. The lover, often identified as being a student, is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. Sitting on a bust of Pallas (Athena), the raven seems to further instigate his distress with its constant repetition of the word "Nevermore". The poem makes use of a number of folk and classical references.

Mostly, most people think of The Raven as a scary poem because the young man panics more and more as the poem goes on.  I like the poem because it has a great rhythm and it is rather musical.  As I mentioned, the poem is long and it uses a lot of old-fashioned words as well.  If you’d like to just listen to a little bit of it, I really like this reading of it.  If you’d like to read along, here is a link to a site that has an illustrated book to go along with the reading.  But my favorite version of all is the Simpsons version.  True, it does include all the crazy, hard to understand words, but it makes it very easy to get a feeling for the story and the mood.  I definitely suggest you take a look at it.  And, if you want more explanation of the poem, Wikipedia does a good job, plus it has several links to more resources at the bottom of the article.  

 So there you go.  Once I started looking for stories about crows and ravens on the Internet, I discovered that there is LOTS of information out there!  Some people even have blogs that are only about crows and/or ravens.  Hmmmmm, seems like crows or ravens might make a good essay or paper topic, eh?