A late afternoon jaunt with Docken on the phone for company. Thank you, Docken.
Last night I was sure I would be going out close to sunrise. Somewhere around 4:40 AM I decided that was not happening. So here it is, shortly after 7:00 PM, past my dinner time so let's get to some photos from the walk.
Did you see yesterday's post? Yesterday's post was fun and informative. Well, it was for me. Today there was a focus on common ravens. It's going to be an internalized debate for me for some time but no, these are ravens and I'll throw in a red-tailed hawk for good luck. But first...
The Agave americana in the local botanical garden finally got chopped down. It was looking rather precarious for some time. This ground squirrel didn't seem too bothered.
Activity in the garden was pretty quiet so I took the long way back to my car so I could drive up and check things out at the top of the hill. Along the way I spotted this birdhouse. This is right across from the school gymnasium. A curious student project, no doubt?
Before I go on and referring back to yesterday's post about cats which are birds, crows and ravens, etc. I pulled this image to further explain because at first glance, especially with birds 100 yards (or whatever) away, the tail feathers don't always make things obvious--crow vs raven. I got this image from the Corvid Research blog.
Here are all of the ravens I was watching together. I now believe that these might be two pairs of “teenagers.”
and here are some pairings of the ravens in flight. They were all close to each other throughout my visit but they weren't all always in my camera view.
Nearby, there were four mourning doves.
What were the doves doing? Well, they seemed to be watching the ravens and the ravens were putting on quite a grand aerial show.
Especially these two.
Things got a little hectic when a red-tailed hawk showed up.
Let's just say neither species cared to share airspace.
After a short while the ravens took off together and the hawk disappeared from camera range. I decided I should add a little distance too and walked some more. Coming back to the parking lot I noticed another red-tailed. I'm pretty sure this is a female and I'm also fairly certain she's carrying an egg or two.
Down below humans were gathering for some sort of Halloween extravaganza.
Frightening!
Once again, I will leave you with a song. Thanks for coming along.
On September 4th I started a post titled, The mystery of the Cat Crow. It was a silly little thing based on an image I took but did not use for my walk report on August 8th. Here is that image...
Let me zoom in a little...
When I came home and started to preview images, I commented to Docken, I've got a crow here with cat ears. And it's not just the ears, aren't the head and neck feathers looking a little fur-like? There is, of course, a logical explanation. It's just a feather blowing in the wind, right? Except there was no wind, not a bit and what feather would that be? There is a degree offered by the school where this picture was taken in Veterinary Technology. Hmm... Who knows, it's the mystery of the Cat Crow. EDIT: It's probably a raven.
Having not posted this until now there was an evolution that had taken place. I've written before about my relatively recent appreciation and fascination in corvids, passerine birds in the family Corvidae. These include crows, ravens, jays, magpies, treepies, choughs, and nutcrackers. My particular focus has been on crows and jays. Unbeknownst to me it was also an attraction to ravens. More on that in a moment.
My new found appeal for corvids started, I suppose, when I came out of Covid hiding in May of 2021 and started walking again at the crack of dawn, most mornings. American crows were particularly noticeable early morning and I felt a certain calm in observing their behavior. I found an intelligence in crows that had me wondering just how much they might rival us humans. Socially, I thought they make us look rather miserable but that's not so hard to do.
Anyway, with the mystery of the Cat Crow and the approach of Halloween, I thought a post dedicated to my new bird friends was in order. I assembled a folder of prior crow images and many that I became aware of as being ravens. I also decided to delve into some AI creation to see if I could generate images depicting various cat bird hybrids.
First up... My confusion over ravens. I swear (a lot) that a couple of years ago, after witnessing what I thought must be ravens, that my cursory Google investigation had me concluding that I was outside of the territory of common ravens. Not only is this not true but I've discovered their expansion into places like Los Angeles is booming. Human presence has allowed ravens to expand into areas where they didn't previously reside, you know, because humans are slobs and quite a bit of our slovenly behavior means we throw food everywhere. Here's an overlay map I hastily put together. The light green represents common raven breeding areas and the red diamond, I live somewhere inside that red diamond.There was no date on the map used for the green overlay. I suspect it’s more than 10 years old.
I'll throw a number out that I believe is reasonably accurate. It appears raven population growth throughout much of the United States has increased about 3% per year over the last several decades. Here, read this, the math is hurting my head.
My bad on mis-IDing common ravens for crows. I'll try to correct that on some of my images here. Here's an article on how to tell the difference. For me, now, the biggest tells are the shape of the tail feathers in flight, the beak size, longer shaggy feathers on the head and neck of the raven and, importantly, crows are typically in larger social groups (a murder of crows) while common ravens travel mostly in pairs or are seen solo.
These images are from a walk report on March 26th. This is a common raven (Corvus corax).
Okay, from here on out I'm going to attempt to write as little as possible and simply post images. Wish us luck! And please remember while a sub-theme of this post is Halloween it's also to understand and appreciate a couple of often misunderstood, beautiful and highly intelligent birds.
Common raven and a Cooper's hawk
Two crows and a mockingbird
Territorial battles between crows/ravens and red-tailed hawks were not uncommon. A few shots will get mixed in here. They might be out of sequence.
That's a mockingbird down low
Crow and a Cooper's hawk
Common raven and a Cooper's hawk
Probably ravens
Common raven hanging on a horse
Crows for a Halloween 2021 post
American crow, it was part of a large murder of crows
Now for the exercise working with AI, trying to reproduce something comparable to the mystery Cat Crow. I used DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and DreamStudio StabilityAI. I probably entered over a hundred variations of a description like a photo-realistic crow with the head of a cat, a bird with a cat's head, a cat-headed crow, maybe a couple dozen variations. I mixed it up a lot and for the most part I got really poor results. Here are some images I choose to keep. Some are just cat and some are just crow or a crow-like bird. You decide.
This was the one I thought looked the most like my mystery Cat Crow.
and now, in no particular order and for no particular reason..
I used a picture of Stan the cat for the eyes here
Meanwhile... Stan thinks, this is all really silly.
Happy Halloween. Please don't demonize animals because they're black or gray or because you're afraid of them. All animals deserve a decent life and moral consideration.
