CORVID-19

I heard a raven outside tonight. I ran to the porch to try and spot it, but couldn’t find it (though I did see a woodpecker). Despite the prevailing notion that ravens are bad omens, I’ve decided to believe it was a good sign. I like to think they’re watching over me (even if it’s only so they can steal all my shiny things).  

I started seeing the ravens last November, while walking the dogs. I heard them first, and when I looked up, I saw the silhouette of a large bird being chased by a bunch of screaming crows. Another large bird flew out from a nearby tree to join the first. I then realized, WITH GREAT EXCITEMENT, that I was witnessing the crows mobbing the larger birds (which is their primary function in life) and that those larger birds were RAVENS. I’d never seen a raven in real life before. Other than a dead one at the wildlife rehabilitation center where I worked and I don’t think that counts. 

When I went to work at said wildlife center the next day and started telling people I saw ravens, I don’t think anyone really believed me. Ravens, while common in Washington state, are not terribly common in this particular area. If you see a large, noisy black bird around here, it’s most likely a crow. 

But I knew I was right, and not just because I’d spent the evening before listening to raven calls on the internet. I saw and heard them a couple more times in the next week or so, and then they disappeared. 

When everything started ramping up with COVID, my job pretty quickly became work-from-home. I started using my lunchtime to take walks on the trails at a park nearby. That’s when I started to hear the ravens again. As I walked the trails, I could hear them calling, but I was never able to pinpoint exactly where they were coming from. I heard them almost daily on my walks, through the rest of March, into early April. 

That’s when we finally saw them. Joe and I went for a walk one evening, on the trail I’d started to call the Raven Walk, where I’d been hearing them for weeks. While we were walking past a small creek, a raven swooped overhead, right across the path in front of us. I saw it out of the corner of my eye first, and it was so large that at first I thought it was a raptor of some kind. It flew so close that we could hear its wingbeats, then it perched in a nearby tree. 

We’d find out later, after visits to pinpoint it, that the tree it had perched in had a nest in it. I reached out to the park staff, who confirmed that a pair of mated ravens lived in the park. I made a habit of continuing my daily walks, and quickly invited a resident raven expert (my friend, Lauren) to confirm what I was seeing. We (fairly obsessively) began to visit the pair and eventually heard at least one baby. We even witnessed the parents hunting and feeding their noisy baby. 

To say I was mildly obsessed would be...well, a lie. I was WILDLY obsessed. I named the raven pair Mulder and Scully because they were taking care of what sounded like baby monsters. I kept a raven log (which is why I had all the details to write this) every day I visited, with what I saw, what time I saw it, where I saw it. It was a great distraction from everything going on with the pandemic and with our dog, Mara, who was going through end stages of cancer at the time. 

We heard them for a couple of weeks and then...they all disappeared. We worried that something had happened to the baby/babies and mom and dad had peaced out. One day, I saw one of the parents screaming in a tree, nowhere near the nest site, but no sign of its mate or of a dumb baby fledgling. We later started hearing them calling faintly from another area of the trail system, and hoped that they’d just relocated when the baby or babies fledged. After a while, I didn’t hear them anymore, but I also wasn’t visiting much because Mara had just died, and I was (surprise, surprise) SUPER depressed. 

When I did eventually pick up my daily walks, I was surprised to hear a nearby raven on the trail in early July. I didn’t see them, but it was nice to hear them again. 

Most people consider seeing a raven a bad omen. And, in fact, I’d started to think this myself. The first time I saw them was actually just a few days before our other dog, Max, died unexpectedly. When I started hearing them again, we’d just found out that Mara’s cancer had spread and she likely didn’t have much time left. The last time I saw or heard them before they disappeared for a while was a few days before Mara died. And when they appeared again? It was when I had just started the journey that ended in a cancer diagnosis. 

It would be easy to say these ravens were some sort of sign that something terrible was about to happen, even though the logical part of my brain, the Scully in me, scoffs at such a thought. Also, that’s an awful lot of responsibility to be putting on a poor bird, no matter how badass it is. 

I’ve decided to be more of a Mulder about this, though, which is very unlike me. I love ravens and refuse to think of them as bad omens. Sure, I saw and heard them before some really horrible things happened in my life. But they also brought me a lot of joy before those things happened. They gave me something to focus on during a weird and confusing time. So maybe they weren’t terrible harbingers of death and despair. Maybe those ravens were for me, all along. To give me something to focus on. Something to look forward to. 

That’s what I want to believe, anyway.