Or perhaps not.

 

The other day the Beloved Significant Other (BSO) came home from the local cemetery saying she’d seen lots of crows there with some even sitting on the grave stones. She suggested we go the next morning and try and get some suitably gothic photos.

Australian crows (Corvus coronoides) are not in fact crows, but are in fact ravens. They are highly intelligent birds using tools to help feed themselves, they’ve also been observed softening dried out hard food in water to make it soft enough to eat. As I said, very clever. For the local Nyoongar people the raven is called Waardong – the watcher – and is seen as crafty, cunning and very unpredictable. That is where our plan failed. There was no way we going to get close enough to get a photo. I approached using cover and while just trying to peek around the corner of a wall they’d immediately  see me and  all take off. I didn’t manage to get one single photo of a raven.

 

There were other birds at the cemetery and I thought that one of them – Wardawort or the Grey Butcherbird (Cracticus torquatus) – would make a suitable replacement for a raven. The Grey butcherbirds were far more approachable than the ravens and it was possible to get quite close which was great for taking photos. The problem was that they didn’t want to sit on top of the grave stones but rather they perched on the wrought iron work that surrounded some of the graves. I still took some pictures but they didn’t match what I’d envisioned – reality seldom does. Getting home I tried processing the the photos as black and white trying to give a suitably dark menacing tone. It just didn’t work. The Grey Butcherbirds didn’t have that spooky/menacing appearance that the ravens have. I also thought that the colour photos looked better, but they did not convey that gothic vibe I was trying to create.

 

It was a fun exercise. We did talk about how we might get the ravens to hang around. The most logical way would be to put down food for them on a regular basis and so change their behaviour. The ethics of that are a bit suss – get animals habituated to humans and dependent on hand outs just for a photo. Bit dodgy that one. We feed and water birds in our garden, but this is different. It is not our garden and the ravens are naturally wary of people. The birds in our garden were  already habituated to us. We didn’t have to put out any food to encourage that. The only other way is to just keep going back over and over again. Who knows we may chance upon a raven that isn’t too fussed about people who is sitting on top of a grave stone and using it as an anvil so they open up snail shells. Preferably on a misty morning. I rather think that pigs might fly first.