May 20, 2020 - Wednesday - SIP Chronicles Ravens as Chefs de Cuisine

In the front yard is a birdbath made of concrete, a shallow moat set upon a pedestal and anchored by a granite-grey frog with blank eyes. Set about halfway between a struggling ash tree and a small pear tree on what we sheepishly call the front lawn, it's been attracting the attention of three ravens lately, who have been treating it as their soup pot  - or gravy boat, depending on how you look at it.

Over a week or so, back in April, I noticed them flying in with wide crusts of sandwich bread, big heel ends of sourdough loaves, hunks of French rolls, leaving them to soak in the warming water, coming back to sip and sup a few hours later on the soggy chunks. Once, I saw a raven take a softened piece and hide it in the shadow of a big fieldstone, covering it up with some leaves and twigs from some nearby mulch. 

The ravens also love to snag mussels out of the marsh and bring them up to the top of a nearby power pole, dropping them so they smash on the sidewalk below. They've been doing this since forever, the sidewalk below the pole constantly littered with pieces of black glossy shells. Then, for reasons I don't quite fathom, they began bringing the broken shellfish over to the birdbath, dropping the meat and guts into the trough. Then they'd tug and tussle with the globby meat, steal chunks from each other, take the dripping bits up into the big limbs of the ash to gobble them down, leaving the little strings of intestine and holdfasts and broken shells in the rough trough of the birdbath or on the dirt and new mulch under it.

This wasn't so bad when the birdbath was dry - just bits and bobs here and there, mostly empty shells. But as spring warmed up and  I began keeping the birdbath filled with water on a daily basis, I realized that the ravens would let the mussel meat steep in the shallow water, let it stew all afternoon in the sun. Sometimes along with some hunks of bread. Like a fancy French restaurant. Or a section of a wasps' paper nest. like a hipster French restaurant. Once or twice, I saw the remains of newly-hatched nestlings, tiny clawed feet, minute grey down-feathers left to simmer and stew all afternoon until the ravens returned to slurp and sup. Like something from a forager's raw-food menu.

At first I thought this was an anomaly, just some odd behavior, but as it became a regular routine, I realized these ravens were cooking, they were chefs de cuisine, harnessing solar power to make their soups and stews. In the morning, I would sluice out the remnants from the concrete trough, like a bouncer hosing down a bar at the start of a new day, flushing out shells and tiny feathers and holdfasts and grey strings of intestines. It would be comical, if it weren't also rather gruesome.