So we leave you with these few pictures of ravens + crows we snapped whilst in Los Angeles (horizontal shots are ravens, verticals are a crow), share this awesome sketch our friend, Chris, at Yellow Owl Workshop posted yesterday, and tell you a few random facts about ravens + crows that make up, in part, what about them fascinates us:
• Ravens are generally much larger than crows and have a harsh, low, croaking call—it sounds kinda like your pawpaw yelling at the TV—as opposed to the crow’s familiar caw.
• Ravens are more solitary than crows, preferring to live in largely rural areas unpopulated by jerk-ass humans; crows, on the other hand, live in large social groups that tend to thrive on the cast-offs of society.
• A group of crows, as you may already know, is called a murder; a group of ravens is called an unkindness (thus the blog name)—goth shit, man.
• The brains of corvids (the family to which both birds belong), relative to their body size, is more in line with that of primates than birds, with enlarged forebrain—the part of the brain responsible for learning + memory—compared to most other birds. So that “bird brain” thing? Off the table!
• Some crows have been observed regularly employing the use of tools + tactics, such as New Caledonian Crows who make a variety of tools to extract ants from trees; American Crows who have been observed hunting sparrows by herding them into the sides of building to stun them; and the Japanese Carrion Crow, which not only learned to drop walnuts in front of stopped cars at traffic lights—retrieving the then-sehlled nut after the car had driven off—but seem to have learned that technique from each other and taught it to other crows. Dudes are smart.
• Due to their increased wingspan, ravens are known to glide often, whereas crows usually cannot.
• They both just look cool, man. And our jobs is to like things that look cool.
We could go on all day with this stuff though. Happy International Crow and Raven Appreciation Day and thanks for reading our dedicated LA Week. We’ll be back to our regular posting next week. Have a good one!
