Common Raven

I haven't been able to get out with my camera all this week and it was driving me crazy. We got a new sink and vanity and I was pretending to be a plumber - and long story short, the real plumber is coming tomorrow.

But I got out for an hour today and on the way to the park on Stevely, there was a Red-tailed Hawk carrying a rodent of some sort, and not a block away a Raven with what appeared to be a lizard.  It was an afternoon of nature red in beak and talon.  The shot above is toward the end of the series of pictures I took, and you can just see a little something left in his beak.  I watched him for several minutes tear up and gulp down his meal.

Common Ravens look just like crows, but they're big.  When you think, "Whoa, that's a huge crow," that's a raven.  Up close, their beak is just enormous.  And they fly more like a hawk than a crow.  The more birds I'm identifying, the more in tune I'm getting with things like sound and movement.  I'm starting to be able to broadly categorize birds I'm spotting just from how they flap their wings.  Big broad-winged birds like ravens and hawks and vultures barely flap at all.  Like flapping is beneath them.  They soar.  You see a big black bird cawing and flapping, that's a crow.  If it's soaring, it's a raven.

And iBird is great for sounds.  Crows and ravens have similar caw-like calls, but they are distinct.  When I have trouble identifying a bird precisely - I'll narrow it down to two very similar-looking birds - I can often pin them down based on the sounds they make.

Common Raven about its lunch, on Stevely near Wardlow, taken with my Nikon and identified on iBird, April 11, 2010.