The Ravenmaster

by Christopher Skaife

  Rats are also a bit of a treat for the birds. I buy rats in bulk from a specialist supplier and store them in the freezer. Then I get out what I need the night before, defrost them in the fridge, and prepare them in the morning. A nice fat rat’ll do a raven all day. A raven’s preferred method of engagement with a dead rat, or indeed with a live mouse if they get hold of one, is perfectly straightforward: foot on, claws in, beak engaged, guts first, then the rest stripped bare, leaving just the skin. All that usually remains is what looks like a mini rat-skin rug, which I like to bag up for the Tower foxes so there’s no waste.

  The ravens get through about a ton and a half of food a year. Their diet mostly consists of chicken, lamb and pig hearts, liver, kidney, mice, rats, day-old chicks, peanuts in their shells, the occasional boiled egg, and some fish, steak chunks, and rabbit (with the fur left on). Anything else they want, they steal it from the bins and from the public, or they just go out and kill it. Most of the meat I get from Smithfield Market. If you’ve never been to Smithfield Market, you should go before it’s too late. It’s one of the great old London institutions, a proper wholesale market, but also open to the public, and always under threat of being redeveloped and turned into swanky offices and fancy restaurants. Smithfield is not for the fainthearted. I was a regular for about a year before any of the traders deigned to actually give me a nod, never mind speak to me. You can get amazing bargains, though only if you’re there by about 5:00 a.m. at the latest, and if you’re prepared to buy in bulk. Whatever you do, don’t ask for a single lamb chop. Tell the lads there that I sent you. They’ll probably tell you where to go, but nonetheless. It’s a start. And once you’re there you might as well nip into The Hope for a pint, or La Forchetta for a cup of tea and a fry-up.

  (Personally, I don’t like to eat until I’ve fed the ravens in the morning. This is not out of politeness. It’s not a matter of manners. I don’t know if you’ve tossed many rats to a raven, or if you’ve ever had to clear up yesterday’s mauled meat leftovers, but from my experience you really don’t want to be doing so while digesting an early morning bacon sandwich. Trust me, it’s best to go with a bowl of porridge once the job is over and done with.)

  To be honest, I’d probably prefer if the birds were all vegetarian, but ravens, like a lot of us humans, are meat eaters. There’s a theory that we Yeoman Warders got the nickname Beefeaters because as members of the royal bodyguard we were permitted to eat as much beef as we could from the king’s table. There are plenty of other theories about the origin of the nickname, but whether any of them are conclusive evidence I don’t know. Frankly, we all prefer to be called Yeoman Warders anyway.

  Given a choice, I fancy that many of the ravens, like many of us, would probably survive on junk food. Merlina in particular is very partial to a potato chip. She watches out for any little chip that a young visitor might drop from her lunch bag, and she’ll take it to one of the water bowls and give it a good rinse, softening it up for consumption. She has a particular ability to be able to spot a tube of Pringles from the other side of Tower Green, hop right up to an innocent member of the public, steal the whole tube, hop off with it, pop off the lid, and quickly cram as many chips into her mouth as she possibly can before being noticed! This is worth bearing in mind if you’re thinking of visiting the Tower and bringing a snack with you. Remember: ravens are opportunists and will happily steal anything from you if and when the need arises.

  I have spent almost as many years now standing at my post on Tower Green watching the ravens getting into scrapes as I spent getting into scrapes myself in the army, and I can safely say that to watch a raven at work scavenging food is to witness something very much like a military operation. As a soldier you’re taught all sorts of drills and standard operating procedures to prepare for battle and how to analyze your options when engaged on a mission. In military terms this is how we might describe one of Merlina’s typical sandwich-snatch operations:

  MISSION: To steal a ham sandwich from a visitor sitting on a bench.

  PLAN OF ATTACK: Sneak up from the rear with stealth and cunning, hide under the bench until the target puts down the sandwich, then remove the prize by pulling at it through the bench slats until in full possession. Then hop off.

  ACTIONS ON: If detected on the approach to the bench, look innocent and peck at the ground.

  ACTIONS ON: If member of the public isn’t putting the sandwich down, jump on the bench and scare them until they drop it.

  ACTIONS ON: If unable to tug the sandwich through the bench slat, pull harder and store as much as you can in your mouth at the same time.

  RE-ORG: Hop to the Ravenmaster for protection while you’re being chased by the angry visitor.

  Whatever their personal snacking habits, I always feed the ravens in the enclosure twice a day, once in the morning and then sometime in the afternoon. Feeding them in the enclosure allows me to monitor what they’re eating. In the past the Ravenmasters preferred to put the food out around the Tower, but the problem was that a seagull might take a nice juicy piece of ox liver, say, that was intended for a raven, have a little nibble on it and then casually drop it on a visitor from a great height. I’ve seen it happen more than once, and believe me, it is not a pretty sight. These days the ravens have come to expect to find food in the enclosure, and because they know they’re going to be fed safely there, they’re happy to roam around all day. It also encourages them to go back to the enclosure as the light fades. It’s a win-win.

  In preparing the food, it’s important of course that we follow basic health and safety requirements. I am an absolute stickler for proper hand-washing procedures. Plus, I like the smell of all the antiseptic stuff. I can remember when I’d just started work at the Tower and the old Ravenmaster, Derrick Coyle, would walk into our guardroom, the Yeoman Warders’ Hall, and I could smell the antiseptic on him. It always reminded me of my childhood. The smell of my mum scrubbing up in the hairdressing salon where she worked, the smell of a day having been properly completed, or just begun. The smell of cleanliness, of preparedness, of a job well done.

  * * *

  Once I’ve distributed the food to the birds in the enclosure, I leave them for an hour or so before letting them out. The great thing about ravens, unlike, say, us humans, is that they’ll only eat until they’ve had enough and then they like to go off and exercise. Anything they don’t use, they’ll cache.

  And speaking of caching, the next thing I do every morning is take care of the foxes.

  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in a life dealing with animals, it’s this: there are always foxes to be taken care of.

  8

  THE MENAGERIE

  As Ravenmaster, I see myself as responsible for all the wildlife in the Tower—including the foxes. What I’ve tried to do here over the years is to create a balance between everyone’s competing needs: the ravens, the foxes, the Yeoman Warders, the Tower visitors. We all share the environment of the Tower, and my job is really about finding ways to enable us to live in harmony together. Most of the time all it requires is a bit of forethought and some careful husbandry. If you leave food lying around, for example—guess what?—the foxes come in where you don’t want them, and they can cause absolute havoc. In the old days, of course, we’d just catch and cage the foxes and take them away for extermination, but my feeling is that they have almost as much right to be here as the rest of us.

  In order to maintain our modest little ecosystem here, every morning after I’ve fed the ravens I take any scraps of food to the fox cache. A cache is a hiding place for ammunition, food, or indeed treasure of any sort. In the army we were taught to set up caches in evasion and recovery operations, storing food and water or medical items, communication equipment, that sort of thing. I decided to set up the fox cache a few years ago when I realized that the best way to manage the foxes in the Tower was to try to think like a fox. It’s that old military thing: know your enemy. With foxes you have to understand that they really
just want to come and fill their bellies, and then they’re happy and they’ll leave you alone. So I found a special place where I can deliver food to them every day, which keeps them happy and well away from the ravens’ enclosure. Job done.

  (And how did I know the best place to leave the food for the foxes? you might ask. Well, I probably know every nook and cranny in the Tower, every rooftop and gutter, every walkway, every staircase, every little crack and fissure. Wherever it is, however high or low, however inaccessible, I’ve been there, found the ravens hiding there, found something they’ve hidden there, or found a fox’s hole or nest or den or warren. Visitors are always asking about hidden tunnels in the Tower. All I can say is that I’ve never discovered any—and I’ve been looking for years.)

  The Tower throughout its history has always been a place full of all sorts of animals. These days a lot of those animals are the cats and dogs and other pets owned by the Yeoman Warders—you’d be surprised how many of us are out early in the morning, walking our dogs in the moat. Apart from the ravens and the foxes, there are also the various squirrels, seagulls, pigeons, sparrows, starlings, kestrels, blue tits, crows, mice, rats, and even the odd pair of Egyptian geese that like to stop over and drink from the ravens’ water bowls. The Tower is an eighteen-acre green oasis in the middle of London, after all. We have a breeding pair of kestrels in one of the arrow slits opposite my house in the Casemates, who have been resident now for many years; we have four different kinds of bats; and every year when Traitors’ Gate is full of water we usually get a duck family settling in with their ducklings. Two magpies, whom I call Ronnie and Reggie Kray after the notorious 1960s London gangsters, like to visit the ravens’ enclosure looking for scraps of leftover meat and seem to have been accepted by them—perhaps on the threat of violence, who knows.

  Until relatively recently, though, most of the animals in the Tower would have been the exotic beasts presented by the rulers of faraway lands to the kings and queens of England. For more than six hundred years the Tower was a sort of a zoo, or at least a storehouse for rare creatures of all kinds, who were an entertainment and spectacle for the Tower’s visitors. In a sense, the ravens are another chapter in the great Royal Menagerie story, and the Ravenmaster is a zookeeper of the world’s only single-species open-air zoo.

  The term menagerie—which I like to use to refer to all of us who live and work together in the Tower—derives from the French and refers to an aristocratic or royal collection of captive animals. As every schoolchild knows, when William the Conqueror invaded in 1066 he ordered that a series of fortresses be built around England to protect his barons from the threat of invading armies and civil dissent—among which fortresses the Tower is of course only the most famous and most long-standing. According to the Domesday Book, the Normans founded nearly fifty castles in the twenty years after landing at Hastings, a building program unprecedented in English history, and which makes even the current real estate boom in London seem not so much a bang as a whimper. What’s perhaps less well-known is that William’s son Henry established England’s first menagerie at his manor house in Oxford, building a big wall to contain his collection of lions, camels, and porcupines. This small royal zoo was eventually moved to the Tower around 1204, during the reign of King John, and hence the beginning of the Royal Menagerie.

  There have of course always been famous animals who have called London home. When I was growing up it was Chi-Chi and Ching-Ching, the giant pandas at London Zoo, and Guy the gorilla. Earlier in the twentieth century there was Winnie, the female Canadian black bear who was apparently the inspiration for Winnie-the-Pooh. And back in the nineteenth century there was the mighty Obaysch, the first hippo in Europe since the days of the Roman Empire, who caused a sensation: Queen Victoria came to watch him swimming in Regent’s Park and compared him to a porpoise. But before all of them, there were the animals of the Tower, the bigger and stranger the better.

  There was a white bear, for example—possibly a polar bear—who was a gift from King Haakon IV of Norway to King Henry III in 1252, and who was kept tethered at the riverside with a huge collar and long rope, allowing him to fish for food in the Thames. I like to imagine the look upon the faces of anyone that happened to be sailing up or down the river when they saw a big white bear swimming past! In addition, in 1255, King Louis IX of France gave King Henry III an African elephant. Just getting it to London must have been a logistical nightmare. According to one eyewitness, “The people flocked to see the novel sight.… The beast is about ten years old, possessing a rough hide rather than fur, has small eyes at the top of its head, and eats and drinks with a trunk.” Again, what a sight, to have seen an elephant at the Tower back then: I compare it today to seeing a Tyrannosaurus rex or some sort of animatronic giant suddenly poking its head over the battlements.

  Like any great collection, the Royal Menagerie just grew and grew, and by the 1300s all the animals in the Tower had to be moved outside to the main western entrance, which was later named the Lion Tower, for obvious reasons. By the time Edward I came to the throne, an official position had been created known as Keeper of the Lions and Leopards, later renamed the Master of the King’s Bears and Apes.

  (My absolute favorite menagerie story is about Elizabeth I, who, as was customary, spent the night before her coronation procession at the Tower. It is said that as the great procession left the Tower to travel through the streets of London to Westminster Abbey, she stopped to deliver a speech to the assembled crowds and to pray to God for her safety. “Thou hast dealt as wonderfully and mercifully with me,” said Elizabeth, “as Thou didst with Daniel, whom Thou delivered from the cruelty of raging lions”—at which moment it is reported that a great roar of the Tower’s lions could be heard, to the astonishment and delight of the crowd. I rather suspect a bit of careful Tower stage management here, with the Keeper of the Lions and Leopards, a man called Ralph Worsley, perhaps ready with the script of Elizabeth’s speech in one hand and a glowing red-hot poker in the other, red-hot pokers being used at the time to control the lions. Statecraft, after all, is a form of stagecraft.)

  * * *

  It wasn’t until 1831 that most of the animals kept in the Tower were transferred to the recently established London Zoo in Regent’s Park, the rest of them being sold off to the American showman P. T. Barnum for his famous touring circus. And it was then in 1835, on the orders of the Duke of Wellington, the Constable of the Tower, that the Royal Menagerie was finally closed. Although the first Ravenmaster wasn’t officially appointed until the late 1960s, I like to think we kind of carry on in the tradition of the ancient Keepers of the Lions and Leopards, though of course they didn’t exactly look after the animals according to the standards that we might expect today.

  There were monkeys, apparently, who were kept in fully furnished rooms. There was a leopard who used to be baited with umbrellas and parasols thrust through the bars of its cage, and there was a zebra who was said to have enjoyed a beer on occasion, and who would duly be served a pint or two in the old soldiers’ canteen. Even today I’m often surprised at what some of our guests think our ravens might like to eat and drink. Just for the record, ravens, though omnivorous, should not and do not eat any of the following items: bubble gum, cola cubes, paper, cigarette butts, chocolate, toffee, or children’s fingers. All of which I have seen being offered up to the ravens on an almost daily basis during my time at the Tower!

  The lesson of the Tower’s menagerie—and certainly the lesson of my own experience with the Tower foxes—seems to be that if we treat animals with respect, we can expect the same in return.

  9

  BLACK BIRDS

  In order to help members of the public identify the birds and for my team to be able to keep an eye on them if I’m not around, the ravens usefully wear colored anklets. I’ve trained them to put them on every morning, just like we put on our shoes and socks. No, of course I haven’t! But for the record, at the time of writing, Munin wears lime green, Jubile
e II gold, Gripp II light blue, Harris purple, Rocky brown, Erin red, and Merlina of course bright pink.

  Most of us city dwellers these days can identify a pigeon—they’re absolutely everywhere—and a blackbird and a robin. A duck, maybe, as long as we don’t have to confirm what kind of a duck. But that’s probably about it on a day-to-day basis. Before I became the Ravenmaster I wouldn’t have been able to identify too many birds either, so let me provide you with a basic guide to raven identification: the Ravenmaster’s Guide to Raven Spotting.

  First, let’s get our terms correct. Some of the local names we have for ravens in the U.K. and Ireland include corbie, corby, croupy craw, croupie, in Irish fiach or bran, in Cornwall marburan, revein, parson, Ralph, and in Welsh, cigfran, cigfrain, gigfran. Common names of the raven worldwide include:

  Danish: ravn

  French: corbeau

  German: Rabe

  Italian: corvo

  Japanese: karasu

  Polish: kruk

  Russian: ворон (voron)

  Spanish: cuervo

  Turkish: kuzgun

  Working at the Tower, you get to pick up all sorts of lingo: I know the word for “exit” in all the major European languages, in Arabic, and in Brazilian Portuguese, as well as the international sign language for “lavatory” (or what Americans call “the bathroom”). Whatever you happen to call them, the ravens at the Tower are what are properly, Latinly called Corvus corax, as named by Carl Linnaeus, who—you’ll remember if you listened in your science lessons in school, which I certainly did not—was the Swedish biologist who came up with the whole system of naming species.

  Ravens are part of the corvid family of birds, which includes crows, magpies, jays, nutcrackers, and even cute little choughs. In Britain and Ireland, the most common corvids are Corvus frugilegus, the rooks, with their gray faces and rounded tail feathers; carrion crows, Corvus corona, who have shorter beaks than the rooks; hooded crows, Corvus cornix, which are the ones that look like they’re wearing gray jumpers or hoodies; Corvus pica, or Pica pica, the magpie, who needs no introduction; and jackdaws, Corvus monedula, those strange stubby little creatures with mad staring silvery eyes. Blackbirds, note, are not corvids: they are thrushes. A lot of corvids are black birds, but not all black birds are corvids. I know, it’s confusing. But don’t blame me. I didn’t make up the rules.