This past spring, a pair of mature ravens built a stick nest, in a half-dead oak tree crotch, back behind my house. The spot provided both cover and sight lines. They brought three rogues into eggy existence—noisy daredevils who learned how to fly and bomb around our rural neighborhood. We’re country, families occupying three or four acres with wooded screens between properties.
Now everybody’s calling, accosting, and demanding to know: what am I going to do about those croaking ravens? Angry voices—phlegmatic, besotted, annoyed, enraged—all wanting those creatures dead and gone. Because starting at daylight, roughly five AM, the young ravens let everybody know: the boys are in town, and it’s a loud party.
Pompous and haughty neighbors get right up in my face. They think they know all the answers, and they expect me to hop to it. I’m bombarded with suggestions: bird shot, airhorns, toxic baits, bow and arrow—nobody much cares how I take the ravens out of this world. Their respective pieces of heaven on earth are gronky-rattled during all opportunistic daylight hours, ruined by bossy, pestilent, undignified scavengers who don’t care a whitewash how much anybody paid for landscaping or end-of-the-road peace. Neighbors hold me to account, tell me there’s unkindness in my failings to deal with the ravens on behalf of all the good folks living in the area. They grow infuriated when I smile while they’re saying such things.
Boyd Moody, who wears a John Deere ballcap but owns a Kubota tractor/backhoe with tilt steering wheel and seat armrests, exceeding the needs of his wife’s beds of iris—he gave me a long-‘til-I-answered ring at ten in the morning, fuming. “Those bastards raided my trashcans. Had lock tops on ‘em, too. Ravens don’t care—they’ve figured out how to tip and rip. I got garbage strewn from roadside to backyard—everything from stinking shrimp shells to baby diapers, now come back to haunt us, sight and smell. My eyes are smarting, Corwin. And I’m not the only one—it’s like those birds went bowling along every lane they could find a frame of bins on. And you and everybody else knows full well, they’re coming from your property, Corwin, so you better have a plan on getting rid of them. This is the kind of thing that breeds ill will between neighbors.”
“Well, Boyd, you pay taxes for the dump—if you’re ever inclined to haul your own refuse—and personally, I like how ravens clean up the roadkill squirrels and chipmunks.”
“Not good enough, Corwin! Buzzards take care of that business without all the racket and other nonsense.” He slammed the phone down before I could offer anything further.
Like how ravens are incredibly smart—smarter than my neighbors in more than a couple of ways. I’ve spent many a pleasant sunrise sitting quiet and observing how one of them will fly high with a stick, do a barrel roll, and fling it, just to see if his brothers can catch it. Unlike my sister’s golden retriever—who’s spoiled and won’t fetch—the siblings are always game. And they rarely miss, their sooty-colored bodies torpedoing down through the sky, snatching the stick before it hits ground. They’re amused and exuberant, cheering one another on.
My next-door neighbor, Lily McCabbage, dressed in teal-colored brushed-cotton PJ’s depicting Tee-Pees and sitting on towels, drove over offended so she could show me just how rude the ravens can be. She’d left her minivan’s windows open at night, came out in the morning, found one of them laughing at her from the roof rack while the other two filched French fries off the floorboards and Go-Gurt packets from the cup holder of the baby seat. The fact that the ravens haphazardly redistributed refuse left in there by her own pack of four nearly feral children didn’t cut mustard or ripped ketchup packages with Lily. Apparently, the ravens found her Kia Carnival’s interior to be the perfect midway for their festive jollity, scampering through her ride and leaving mice feet and frog gut prizes they’d brought along just for the winners. Upon inspecting the debacle, I didn’t say boo about how the ravens hadn’t finished off everything—popcorn, crushed nachos, and pizza crusts were still to be found, perhaps soon to be vacuumed, finally.
I couldn’t track all of her loud and righteous complaint, but Lily’s final salvo was plain enough: “Kill them, Corwin. Kill them and scarecrow hang ‘em up as a warning to every damned bird of their ilk. And when you’re shooting them, be sure to aim toward Old Coot Andrade’s place. I don’t want any collateral damage firing through the trees near me and my babies.”
It wasn’t worth informing Lily that ravens are on the Migratory Bird Act list of 1918, and it’s actually a federal crime to kill them. I don’t tell her how, for centuries, there’s people who swear it’s flat-out bad luck to kill a raven—but if you are crazy enough to do so, then it’s imperative that you bury it, and you have to wear all black while digging the grave. I have a couple of ancient band T-shirts in black, but my jeans are all fades of blue. I don’t even own a gun. That’s for the best.
Drunk-ass Dinky Jones still pulls in C-Band signals using an ugly, giant satellite dish he bought for $1500 back in 1985 with intentions of program piracy. Because it’s so tall and wide, that eyesore and technological relic provides the ravens with a perfect high spot to scout the area around his bug-infested back yard. He rolled in on me while I was electric mower-mowing my own lawn. Even with the electrical quiet, Dinky somehow felt a compulsive need to make non-verbal but pronounced and demanding gestures that I stop what I was doing; once I did, he pushed polaroids into my hands that smelled of chemicals and something belonging to a shelf lower than liquor store Old Crow. The captured images looked like someone had squeezed tubes of toothpaste all over the array, and Dinky’s gingivitis breath and harsh words accused the ravens of having pooped his television reception into a state of uric acid-burned graininess. I wanted to say that he should view this as a good luck omen, one heralding his transition to streaming, but I’ve never found much use in arguing with a drunken man, especially one named Dinky.
It was mid-morning when he’d managed the drive over to my place, so his usual slurring hadn’t fully kicked in yet, and I heard Dinky well enough to understand how his soul works: “It’s us against them. Poison, Corwin, that’s what you use. Soak canned peaches in anti-freeze and leave the cans right under their roost-tree. Clever, huh? Those bird-brains will choke that toxic concoction down without even thinking, and soon they’ll be dropping like chunks of coal out of the nest. Then, you burn ‘em in your fire barrel, make yourself all warm and toasty.”
Holding no fraternal feeling for the fool, I just couldn’t hold my tongue. “You know, Dinky, if you just take a spoon and a kitchen pot out your back door and bang on it, ravens will leave. Easy enough, doesn’t cost a thing.” But I knew I’d made a mistake the moment the reasonable suggestion rolled out of my mouth.
“The damage is done, Corwin! It’s on you to remedy the situation, or we have us a serious problem. My beautiful dish is befouled and fritzing by way of your unruly flock migrating over to my property. Here’s my last word on it: dirty for dirty, and death to them birds!” He wobbled his way back over to his rusty Datsun King Cab, spun gravel in my driveway, and left in a red-faced huff.
I know full well how to drive away pests. Outside of the 425 resident bird species of which my neighbors can recognize a grand total of thirteen, the birds in bitter dispute fall into the category of “Common Ravens”—though they are anything but. The throaty tone of their calls echo against homes and barns and lawn ornamentation of every sort. Music, to my ears. Driving along our roadway, I’ve spotted the trickster trio in their visitations to the various neighbors. From lofty perches, they watch the world beneath them, gurgling back and forth, gossiping over what their eyes tell them about stupidity and weakness. Each morning I awaken to their free-spirited calls, go to my window and watch them launch away in a spiraling murmuration, heading out with plans for stealing small shiny things left unattended in yards, or else they’re using the one-brother distraction plot to raise a defensive mother cowbird from her nest, the other two swooping in, plucking an egg or two. That’s the way their world works. Ravens are unrestrained schemers and toolmakers—they strut and frolic through flower beds, hold kingly omnivorous banquets on the variety found in local crops of all descriptions. Ravens make it work.
Boyd and McCabbage and Dinky aren’t the only ones scratching and laying into me. Everbody’s piling on. But if people would only read Humanity’s history, then the lesson is clear: revere the raven. Native American tribes have worshipped them as symbols of healing and transformation. In Norse mythology, the All-Father Odin chose to be sagely advised by a pair of ravens regarding the heroism and transgressions of man. In ancient Wales, people nodded into a wisdom and respect for Death—a state of being they referred to as The Raven’s Feast. And Edgar Allen Poe darkly understood humankind’s inability to escape its ultimate, arrogant fate. Me—I know lots about ravens. And fate. And my neighbors.
To encourage ravens to go elsewhere is simple: a watchful, swishy-tailed outdoor cat, or a silly dog doing zoomies on the lawn. Ravens deem them predators, and wisely avoid such situations, moving on to easier pickings. And that’s the deal: if any of my neighbors played nice, owned some real-sized mutts or roaming coon cats, then their respective homesteads would be left well enough alone. But that isn’t what me or the ravens see. If any of the people hereabouts had the wherewithal to download pre-recorded predator sounds—dogs and cats, hawks and eagles, fishers and, of course, humans—and play it through an outdoor speaker on a repeating loop—then their inane little problem would soar away, no arguments, no animosity. But I’m not uttering a word.
I understand predatory approaches. If I catch a skunk in a Havahart trap and release it in a new location—a garage, perhaps—then that tends to odiferously undermine people’s thoughts that they’re chosen and blessed and living in Paradise. If I call my circle of neighbors and lean into conspiracy thinking, telling them I had my well water tested, found unacceptable levels of radon, arsenic, and uranium from underground, then their tiny brainpans might realize that their faucets draw from the very same water table as mine, and relocating to town water and sewer suddenly sounds appealing. I understand that, like lightning bolts right out of the blue, invasions of chinch bugs by the cupful can suddenly attack a square milage, munching brown patches out of each and every manicured “country” lawn in the vicinity. Meanwhile, vinegar is great for marinating fresh cucumbers when you whisk it together with sugar, salt, and pepper; but when you spray the malt or apple varieties on garden plant roots under a crescent moon, it performs a whole different trick, acting like a natural herbicide. And vibrant raven song grates on the uninformed ear.
That’s my understanding. I can’t imagine a superior environment for living, communing with the best of what nature has to offer. They’re kind of simple and amusing, all these out-of-place people around here—they don’t know ravens. They don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know me.
Scott T. Hutchison‘s work has appeared in The Georgia Review and in The Southern Review. New work is forthcoming in Arkansas Review, Unwoven, The Fourth River, Clackamas Review, The Dolomite Review, Porchlight, and Atlanta Review.