by
Tim Homan
Summer 1988, Canyonlands National Park*, southern Utah's redrock and hoodoo country. Wingate Sandstone, Chinle Formation, Moenkopi Formation, White Rim Sandstone: a geologic layer cake from the Permian, the Triassic, and the Jurassic, each band with a distinct composition, age profile, and color that changes with the light.
Page and I arrived at the small primitive campground (Willow Flat in the park's Island in the Sky district) late in the afternoon, the day cloudy and surprisingly cool, and staked out our tent, a dinky two-person dome. We are both in the tent, resting from the three-day drive. I am flat on my back and moaning intermittently from unaccustomed chest pains: a fast pulse with some sort of arrhythmia, painful and thudding, at a ratio of one squirrely misfire every five or six quick beats. The pain is not heart-attack severe, not excruciating, but damned inconvenient and disconcerting nevertheless.
While we lay there, waiting … thud, low moan … thud, low moan … for some resolution, both of us hear a long drawn-out sigh-aaaaaahhhh, fairly high pitched and feminine sounding. Then another long sigh spoken in the same moderately loud voice, soft and soothing as a lullaby. Either the forest fiddles are playing a totally new tune, or we are no longer alone. We flip the tent flap open, expecting to see a hiker or cyclist come to claim a walk-in site. Nothing. Aaaaaahhhh, the seemingly empathetic sigh again, coming from our right a couple of campsites over. We crawl halfway out of the tent, glance to the right and verify that we are no longer alone, that the sighs come from flesh and blood not the bark of rubbing branches.
Flesh and blood and feathers: a black-as-a-midnight-cave raven with a big bludgeoning honker of a beak is perched in a silver-gray snag only two campsites and 23 paces away. Proof comes quickly while we watch and listen. The raven sees us, sighs improbably soft and gentle again-aaaaaahhhh-for confirmation. We have never heard a Mountain South Common Raven produce a sound anything like this long and sleepy sigh. The guttural crunks and croaks we have heard in Highland Dixie sound like they come from ravens that drink whiskey, smoke cigarettes, and gargle with gravel.
The sighs make us laugh. I focus on these wonderful mimic sounds instead of my heart. We start adding raven-wish words after the sighs for much needed distraction: I wish Mr. Moan would finish croaking so I can eat his eyeballs; I wish that mature female in the nylon nest with fur face would leave me a bag of barbecue chips on the picnic table then take a sun shower.
After a fairly long stint of regular sighing, the raven lifted off and left camp-no eyeballs, no barbecue chips, no eye candy. Our best guess: that mimic corvid was imitating the sound of the wind blowing through the hobgoblin hoodoos.
Years later, park-pass-eligible geezers now in the summer of 2015, we arrived at Yellowstone's* Bridge Bay Campground early afternoon in late July. While we are putting up our portable bedroom, a large REI tent roughly the size and shape of a Conestoga wagon without its wheels, we hear a loud and comical gurgling chuckle we have never heard before. The vocalizations are novel, pleasing, a joy to hear. They bring quick smiles to our travel weary faces. We don't know what creature is creating these magical sounds, but now wiser in the mimic ways of corvids, we suspect the maker of the uncommon utterance is the Common Raven.
We lay down hammer and sturdy metal stakes and listen to the forest. The cone-shaped conifers sing out the same gurgling chuckles all around, but none of our benefactors are in sight. We walk out onto the campground road, look up into the tree tops while making a 360-degree pivot. Three ravens perched atop evergreen steeples are busy giving voice to the sounds, their shaggy throat feathers quivering slightly through our binoculars, over and over again. They look like they are having as much fun as kids imitating fart noises. Perhaps the gurgle was a new mimicry circulating through the corvid camp for the sheer entertainment of copy-catting.
Our campsite is situated a few hundred yards from the shore of Yellowstone Lake as a raven flies. We guessed they were imitating, mimicking, the sound of mountain water: rapids on the nearby Yellowstone River or, more likely, the waves that break against the rocky lakeshore every windy afternoon.
If their renditions of breaking waves were the smiling yin of kindness, their morning screeches, immediately jarring and jangling to the nerves, were the scowling yang of curse. Every morning as the day gained the first few lumens of early light, the obsidian-colored songbirds made raucous strafing runs up and down the campground roads, shrieking at the top of their corvid lungs. I asked Page what the birder term was for a group of ravens. "An unkindness of ravens," she replied.
At first we were baffled by those discordant vocalizations. But late in the third afternoon at the campground, we heard the nearly incessant shrieks of young girls riding their scooters scary-fast downhill. Our best and only hypothesis: the local ravens had turned their girl-mimic shrieks into alarm clocks from corvid hell.
I have no scientific proof, but I swear those ravens were rousting us out of bed. I believe those bird brains had learned that campers rose and began cooking earlier when awakened by the piercing cries of their girl-shriek alarm clocks: a clear cause and effect scenario-campers up, campers cook, campers leave. We swoop in to eat the leftovers.
Ravens are not only the largest passerines in North America, but they are also the smartest of the wonderfully bright and brash Corvidae clan. They are both mega and Mensa songbirds, plenty brainy enough to understand that there are no grits and bacon bits (our breakfast) until the campers are upright and moving around the picnic tables. Page and I heard those shrill shrieks for about ten minutes six consecutive mornings at dawn. We asked other campers if they had heard the raven's early morning wake-up screeches at other times of the day. Much to their relief, no one had heard those loud and extraordinarily harsh calls after early breakfast.
Later in the Yellowstone summer, while hiking up high in a near sub-alpine habitat, we became reacquainted with Clark's Nutcrackers and their discordant corvid calls. Next hike up high we sit down for a mid-afternoon snack and hear a nearby nutcracker. We look around, can't find the conspicuous bird-a foot long, all white, black, and gray. We are baffled. There is absolutely nowhere for a big and nearby bird to hide. We hear the nutcracker again, home in on the source of the sound. We raise our binocs and focus, you guessed it, on a lone raven in a mostly dead whitebark pine. We hold our enhanced eyes steady and watch as the raven's outsized bill opens and cries out a long and nasal kra-a-a-a, grating as fingernails scraped across a blackboard, a perfect nutcracker call.
*At approximately 337,598 acres, Canyonlands is the largest of Utah's five national parks.
*Yellowstone, at approximately 2,221,766 acres, is the second largest U.S. national park south of Alaska. Death Valley, which encompasses approximately 3,422,024 acres, is the lower-48 champ.
