In the garden with my friend, may some goddess rest her soul, we would often listen to the ravens talking to each other on the other side of the dingle at the top of the deer park, and wonder what they were saying to each other.
There’s a lot we don’t know about birds. We don’t know why eggs are egg-shaped, although we have a history of men obsessively interested in their egg collections, and many naturalists started as boy egg-collectors. Even with the extensive research conducted by the poultry industry we still don’t know this; and we still don’t know why wagtails wag their tails. Or the reason for the undulating flight of the green woodpecker. But if you listen to a pair of ravens croaking and cronking and burbling together every evening, you don’t really need a behavioural ecologist to tell you that they are talking to each other.
Round here ravens mostly live as pairs with territories, and the younger ravens that have no territories live in groups up in the hill country. Like jackdaws and rooks, they like to roost together. Rooks will often gather at their rookery on winter evenings before sneaking off at nightfall as furtively as possible to their roosts, which can be far from the rookery – they only stay the night at the rookery in the nesting season. In Snowdonia the paired ravens stay in their territories to roost, but large numbers of young landless ravens fly to the big roost in the pinewoods of Newborough Warren, across the Menai Straits on Anglesey.
Ecologists have long wondered why these ravens roost together. As usual, they come up with hypotheses and try to test them. One was that they got together every night to communicate, maybe sharing information about food supplies.
The farmer who started the Red Kite feeding station at Rhayader once told me that it started by accident as a result of such bird communication. He noticed a kite hanging around the farm in a way he thought was a bit needy, so he got it some meat one day. The next day it came back with about six other kites, and that was the start of the Gigrin Farm Kite Feeding Station, a spectacle that delayed the spread of kites into Herefordshire for at least a decade because they were all in the daily habit of popping back to Rhayader for lunch.
One way they tested the theory that ravens roost to share information was by putting small coloured beads in carrion. Dead sheep, hares and suchlike were laced with these beads and placed at varying distances from the big roost at Newborough Warren. Ravens, like owls, seagulls and many birds of prey, disgorge pellets full of indigestible stuff like fur and bone, and every morning pellets at the roost were collected, logged, analysed and searched for beads. They could thus plot the regular roosting positions of birds that went to feed on the research carcasses. It seemed that particular birds might lead groups of ravens out to carcasses that they had discovered. These birds often performed aerial displays above the Newborough Warren pinewoods before roosting, and made a lot of vocalisations before leading other ravens out to the carcass they had been feeding on the day before. These researchers were fairly sure that aerial display flights before roosting were part of the communication, but there is much more work to be done. *
Ravens are also known to communicate by gesturing with their wings and pointing with their beaks, and they perform elaborate flight displays in their mating rituals. They are believed to act as aerial spotters for wolf packs in North America and maybe elsewhere, using flight displays and vocalisations to tell wolf packs where deer can be found. In return they get to feed on the wolf pack’s kills. The wolves tear open the kills, which is something ravens can’t do, and when they have eaten enough the ravens eat the scraps. There is even a belief that the individual wolves and individual ravens know and recognise each other, making this start to look like an organised and overt cooperation between species. They may even have cooperated in this way with early human hunters, and some Inuit believe that ravens show them where to find seals. (See Barry Lopez, ‘Of Wolves and Men’, 1978).
I was able to visit Newborough Warren recently while in North Wales, staying up on Cilgwyn Common, site of the first quarries of the Nantlle valley slate. Here the commoners were able to take advantage of their right to quarry slate on the common without being forced to pay some landowner, which made them a little more prosperous. Nevertheless the contrast between the small ruined cottages up on the commons and the local landowner’s palatial house was as gross as I’ve seen anywhere. While the quarrymen worked outdoors in all weathers and dangers, going back to tiny cottages to try to dry out before the next day’s rain soaked their inadequate clothing again, their local landowner’s huge house and park seemed calculated to flaunt his wealth and comfort. What drew me to it, as an inveterate trespasser, was the sight of the wall around the estate, twelve feet high and eight miles round. God knows how much it cost to erect this statement of his jealous guardianship of his exclusive property rights. The only lands around where he wasn’t bothered about whatever title he may have had were sterile rocky commons such as at Cilgwyn and Moel Tryfan. The local people still had common rights to stone and grazing and so on, but as far as the landlord was concerned the land was thought too poor to bother with. As was fairly general in our uplands, the aristocracy did not bother to use enclosure to extinguish the ancient shared land use rights of the commoners on these infertile unprofitable areas unless they wanted to establish grouse moors or deer forests. In this case it suddenly became apparent to the landowner that if he could extinguish the commoners’ rights he could profit from their labours in the slate quarries on the commons. In 1823 he tried to have a law passed to give him control of all the Moel Tryfan commons, and extinguish the rights of common use, so that the commoners would have to pay him for the slate they quarried. Maybe as good an example as you might find to support my view that the only reason that the landed gentry didn’t usually steal the upland commons was because they weren’t usually worth stealing.
And the connection, you may ask, between Newborough Warren and the landowner who tried to steal the commons? Only that the landowner was Lord Newborough. And that I take an interest in those kinds of things. Enough of an interest to look him up on the internet one evening as the sun set over Anglesey. I’m not sure how much to believe the stereotype of Welsh slate miners working 6 days a week, going to chapel on the seventh and being generally serious folk improving themselves via brass bands, choirs, Methodism and the Workers’ Educational Association. But while they were doing that sort of thing, or not, the Lords Newborough seemed to have combined being very rich and living the lives of JPs, MPs and Lords Lieutenants with achieving almost nothing else, though they also seem to have had a few fairly crazy penchants. The first one, at the age of 50, persuaded an Italian couple to give him their 13 year old daughter, his first wife having died a few years earlier, in 1776. The girl protested and asked to be sent to a nunnery – anything but his lordship – but he got her anyway and eventually when his only son and heir died she was persuaded to overcome her repugnance and provide him with two heirs, the second and the third Lords Newborough. The first Lord built two play forts, one called Fort Williamsburg in the grounds of his estate, close to his mansion, and the second, Fort Belan, at the southern end of the Menai Straits. In spite of his having in effect a private army, these forts were useless from a military point of view and would not have stopped the revolutionary French from invading had they wished to. The second Lord Newborough was chiefly known for having tried to appropriate the rights of the local commoners as described above. The cannons at Fort Belan remained in the family, though, and the seventh baron was prosecuted in1976 for firing off one of the family cannons across the Menai Straits, sending a cannonball through the sail of a passing yacht and terrifying the bathers on the beach across the straits. Although this happened on his mother-in-law’s birthday, he denied all knowledge of it, saying a big Lord did it and ran away. He was found guilty and fined, and was eventually fired from a cannon by his son, who humanely had him cremated first.
I have tactfully refrained from trying to find out how much the Newborough (Wynn) family benefitted from slavery, but it is well known that the next big estate up the coast at the Pennant family’s Penrhyn Castle benefitted hugely from the slave trade, and few of these estates are free of this taint. These estates were also major destroyers of biodiversity, which in those days was called vermin. Ravens were already very scarce when, between 1874 and 1902, Penrhyn Estate killed 464 ravens. You can be sure that the Newborough Estate at Glynliffon also did its best to exterminate this remarkable bird, though their vermin book does not survive. I’m glad that there are now no Newboroughs at Glynliffon but that the ravens have a thriving roost in the woods that bear the name, and I like to think that it is partly because they are so intelligent and communicative that they have been able to survive the landowners and farmers who want them dead.
Other corvids, such as crows and jackdaws, seem now to be the most numerous birds in a much depleted countryside. Often when I’m out I see little else. I am tempted to wonder whether it is their exceptional intelligence and their communication skills that enable them to survive when so many of our favourite birds have been unable to cope with industrial agriculture.
* https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2656.2003.00771.x
I'm not rooting for Lord Wotsit but the building of an eight mile wall around his splendid private plot could have kept local workers in funds over several Welsh winters. I never pass a park wall in England without thinking how its erection would have served the local farm workers in the farming off season. Of course they should have been paid more generously for the work they did throughout the on season but that's another matter...
Ravens used to follow bands of armed men [ an "army" was 30 men or more] noted in this country from the 5th c onwards. They knew there were likely to be pickings afterwards. The bigger the army, the more ravens.
The ones that nest at the Showground in Builth have relatives that nest in the hills to the south. When they come visiting, and it's time to return, the Showground couple come to 'see them off' and peel off back to the RWAS roughly over my house. Sometimes, they get bored and suddenly loop the loop, or fly upside down. I expect those are "teenagers". They have an AMAZING vocabulary: you hear the weirdest sounds and investigate - sure enough, there's a raven overhead. I LOVE them.