The Ravenmaster

by Christopher Skaife

  There are more than forty members of the genus Corvus worldwide, and they all tend to be, in general and in summary, adaptable, intelligent birds who typically mate for life, hide their surplus food, and eat both animals and vegetables. They’re also an incredibly hardy bunch who can be found just about anywhere and are at home anywhere—in deserts, in the Arctic, on coasts, on mountain peaks and in towns and cities. Ravens are survivors.

  They’re also sleek. They are stocky. They have strong legs and feet, and a distinctive gait which makes them seem rather human: they walk with a sort of a roll and a slouch. Charles Dickens described their walk as like that “of a very particular gentleman with exceedingly tight boots on, trying to walk fast over loose pebbles.” I couldn’t put it better myself. They also have large heads and large eyes proportionate to their bodies. They have stout heavy bills and they’re a little bit shaggy and jowly around the throat—like a lot of Yeoman Warders, in fact. They look a bit like crows, but they are bigger than crows. Quite a lot bigger. Ravens weigh about three times as much as your average crow, which is more than the difference between a light flyweight and a heavyweight in boxing. That’s a big difference. Their beaks are bigger and heavier than a crow’s, and they have a broader wingspan—a raven’s wingspan is between three and four feet. How else can you tell the difference between a raven and a crow? Ravens often fly in pairs: crows usually fly in groups. A raven’s tail is wedge-shaped: a crow’s tail is more like a fan. Ravens croak: crows caw.

  The first time I got up close and personal with the ravens I couldn’t believe the size of them. I had been working at the Tower for about six months when the Ravenmaster at the time, Derrick Coyle, came up to me and said, “Hey, Boy!” He called everyone Boy. He was about sixty at the time. I was about forty. “Hey, Boy,” he said, “I think the ravens might like you.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure whether Derrick meant that they might like me, as in they would like to eat me, or whether they would like me as a person or as a Yeoman Warder. I had visions of something like Strictly Come Dancing, with the birds all lined up holding scorecard marks out of ten. Whatever he meant, I was intrigued. Since arriving at the Tower I’d watched the ravens hopping around Tower Green, going about their daily business, but I had no real understanding of exactly why they were here or what they did. I knew almost nothing about birds. At school I’d had a friend who was a keen pigeon racer and I remember he showed me his pigeons once, which I’ll be honest I wasn’t that excited about. My only real contact with the Tower ravens was when our cat, a large gray Persian called Tigger, used to bother them by sitting on top of the old cages, lazily dangling his paw through the bars and teasing them, and Derrick would yell at me, “Get that dammed cat off the cages, Chris, or the birds will have it for dinner!” Surely, I thought, it should be the other way around? Years later, of course I’ve realized just how right Derrick was: more than once I’ve seen a raven chasing the Tower’s many resident cats and dogs.

  “Come on then,” said Derrick. “Follow me.” And I followed. You did not argue with Derrick Coyle, RVM (Royal Victorian Medal). He’d been a legend in the army and he was a legend within the body of Yeoman Warders. With Derrick, what you saw was what you jolly well got. He’d had an exemplary military career, having joined the Green Howards—a famous British Infantry unit, also known as the Yorkshire Regiment—as a boy soldier and having worked his way up the ranks to become the battalion’s RSM (Regimental Sergeant Major). He was your archetypal Sergeant Major, tall and erect even when relaxed, always smart, always sharp. He would have been perfect in an old black-and-white war movie. But beneath his harsh military exterior he was the very kindest of gentlemen, and a great judge of character.

  So Derrick led me to the old raven quarters, opened up the door, and told me to get inside the cage with two of the biggest birds that I had ever seen.

  “Don’t look them directly in the eye,” he said. “And keep your distance. Don’t get too close. They find it threatening.” They find it threatening! I had absolutely no intention of looking them directly in the eye or getting too close!

  I was feeling rather intimidated. I’d always been keen on wildlife, but I’d never been this close to such huge birds before and I didn’t quite know what to expect. Anyone who’s ever been trapped in a small space with a bird will know exactly what I mean: you don’t have to be ornithophobic to be a little bit anxious around birds. If you don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t understand what they’re doing, birds can seem wildly unpredictable. I’d also heard from the other Yeoman Warders all sorts of lurid tales of raven attacks and the last thing I wanted was to be bitten.

  I edged very slowly further inside the cage.

  “Don’t show them you’re scared,” said Derrick. “They’ll notice, and they’ll remember.”

  “Okay,” I said, absolutely petrified, but determined not to show it.

  So there I was, standing in the corner of the cage for what seemed like an eternity, with a pair of ravens staring hard at me, their beady eyes piercing deep into my soul. I’ve been in some tricky spots in my time, but I can remember that as if it were yesterday. Suddenly, to my surprise one of the birds came and perched right next to me. I could feel the raven’s breath on my face. I wondered whether I should start to move away slowly, but to my surprise the raven simply cocked its head from side to side, then dipped its head as if to bow, thrust out its wings, and gave a loud cronking sound.

  “All right,” said Derrick. “Out you come.”

  Looking back, I realize that Derrick put me in the cage that night with two of the largest ravens to gauge my reaction, to see whether I showed fear and whether I could cope with being around them. Plus, ravens themselves are great judges of character, and Derrick would have picked up instantly whether or not they were going to be able to work with me. Sometimes the only way to learn is to be thrown in at the deep end.

  “Yep, you’ll do,” he said, hauling me out of the cage. “Meet me tomorrow at 0530 hours.” And that was that. I’d passed the interview with the ravens and was immediately taken under Derrick’s wing as one of the Ravenmaster’s assistants. Of course, I wouldn’t dream of introducing my new assistants to the ravens like that nowadays. Well, maybe not quite like that.

  As I was saying, ravens are big. The average raven is about two feet long, and they weigh about two and a half pounds. They are indeed the largest of all the so-called passerine birds, which—going back to the naming and classification system—are birds of the order Passeriformes, which includes more than half of all bird species. There are lots of birds that are bigger, obviously—herons and waterfowl, falcons and other birds of prey—but for most of us on a daily basis the corvids are going to be the biggest birds around. And while we’re talking Passeriformes, here’s a bit more ornithological stuff for you: passerines are divided into three suborders, one of which is called the Passeri, or oscines. “Oscine” means “songbird,” and “passerine” literally means “perching.” So ravens are part of the corvid family, the oscine suborder, and the passerine order. Which is good to know, isn’t it? And which is about all I know about the order Passeriformes. What I can tell you with certainty, passerine-wise, is that perch the ravens most certainly do—often in the most inconvenient of places. Ravens are also elegant and playful in flight, known for their rolls and dives, and when they walk, they like to strut and stride. Oh, and of course their main distinguishing feature is that they are black.

  I say they’re black, but up close their blackness reveals itself to be an incredible range of deep purples and greens and blues. The feathers of the older ravens in particular become iridescent: Munin and Merlina are astonishingly colorful up close. Over the years I’ve taken thousands of photos of the ravens to share on social media, and occasionally I manage to catch some of the colors, colors so startling that people sometimes ask if the photos have been altered in some way. Some birds in the corvid family are indeed extremely colorful—the green jay, found in North an
d South America, for example, is about as bright as a parrot—but even the humble raven contains within its blackness a whole spectrum, a whole rainbow, a chord of black. The black can be sooty, soily, glazed, cindery, blackboard black, kohl black, coal black, noir, schwarz, nero. I don’t know how many words and phrases there are to describe black—slate black, cast-iron black, jet black, flat-screen-TV black, ink black, burnt black, liturgical black, hell black—but the raven’s black is as various and as a dense as there are meanings and values attached to the very idea of black, black representing death, mourning, negation, sin, solemnity, the vacancy of space, and all the horrors of human terror and the exercise of power.

  There are many myths and stories about how the ravens and other corvids became black. In Greek myth, Apollo turned a crow from white to black after the bird gave him the bad news that his girlfriend had gone and married someone else. There’s also the story of how the prophet Muhammad was hiding from his enemies in a cave when a crow, who was white, spotted him and cried “Ghar, ghar!” which means “Cave, cave!” Muhammad’s enemies didn’t understand the crow’s cries, however, and Muhammad duly escaped, but not before he turned the crow black for his betrayal and cursed him forever to only be able to cry “Ghar, ghar!” The Alaskan Athabascans—some of the early inhabitants of Alaska—believed that in the time before humans, when the world was young, the raven was as white as snow. Raven was the creator of the mountains and a lover of life whose soul was filled with light and beauty. All this goodness made his evil black twin brother jealous, and the evil twin killed the white raven—and ever since the world has been imperfect and the raven black. In one of Aesop’s Fables a raven desires to be white like a swan and goes to wash his feathers in a lake—but because he’s not a swan and he cannot feed there, he drowns!

  As far as I can tell, all of the stories about how the raven became black suggest that it was a punishment due to some sort of offense or misdemeanor. Yet in fact, in the wild, black feathers are strong and practical: they absorb heat, which means the birds can live in cold climates as well as in warm, and at night it obviously means that they are indistinguishable, to us and to all other predators. Black is not only beautiful, it is eminently sensible.

  10

  THE RAVEN SPREADS HIS WINGS

  When we release the ravens from their enclosure in the morning we have to do it in a particular order. Munin and Jubilee go first: they go straight to their territory in the northeast corner of the Tower, by Martin Tower. Then Harris and Gripp: they go to the south lawn. And finally, Erin and Rocky, to the south lawn also: they’re the dominant pair, so I always let them out last, which allows the others to get safely to their territories without being challenged by Erin or Rocky en route. If we release the ravens in any other order it causes havoc. And I mean chaos. Mayhem. Ravens are creatures of habit and often the slightest change will cause all sorts of problems. I believe the correct term to describe such a tendency in animal behavior is neophobic. They like their rituals and routines. They like their pecking order. They like to know who’s who and what’s what. I suppose I’m the same.

  I watch the ravens every day as they take flight every morning, during the day, at night, again and again and again. I have watched them and thought about it and studied it thousands of times, and it is a spectacle that never ceases to amaze. They all move slightly differently, of course, every bird, the same as we all move differently depending on our life experiences and our genetic makeup. But they all sort of crouch and then they unfurl their wings and jump, and then they’re away, with their wings on a downstroke, which creates the pressure to allow them to move forward and upward, and they flap and flap—but not like a crow’s flap, mind you, crows have to make so much effort, while the ravens just glide—and they’re away before you know it. It’s incredible. You have to slow it down in your mind’s eye in order to be able to understand it and to appreciate it, the sight of it, the sound of it. Can you imagine it, that feeling? Can you imagine what it would be like to be able to take off and swoop and glide wherever you wanted, spiraling in the sky without a care in the world, watching the earth below shrink into insignificance, entirely in control of your own destiny? It is one of the great sadnesses of my life that I will never know what it’s like to fly.

  I do know what it’s like to fall. I did my skydiving training with the army in Cyprus. We did a lot of adventure training there: rock climbing, scuba diving, free-fall parachuting. You name it, I’ve probably done it. It’s one of the great perks of being in the army—it’s what I joined up for. I was always the sort of soldier who wanted to try everything. I always wanted to see how far I could push myself, how far I could go. I’ve always been competitive, right from when I was a child. I can remember once I was lined up at the start of a race on sports day at my primary school and I saw my mum in the crowd and I called out, “Mum, watch me win this!” And win it I did. I was the same throughout my military career, always giving things my best shot, as it were. That’s just who I am. I’ve always wanted to test myself, to better myself. During my time as a junior soldier I became a junior lance corporal and then a junior corporal. Not that I was anything special: I was just the sort of soldier who kept on going. I can remember, in training, jumping from the back of a four-tonner—the trusty old British Army trucks used to transport troops and supplies—during one exercise, and I felt my ankle crack, but I was so determined not to be back-squadded I just strapped it up and carried on. About a week later, when I could hardly walk, I finally went to see the doctor. I was put in a plaster cast for six weeks, but even then I kept on training. I couldn’t admit defeat.

  Watching the ravens, I can well remember my first free-fall parachute jump. We were up in a little Cessna, and it came to my turn and I got up and turned around and gave a big thumbs-up and jumped out backward, which we weren’t supposed to do. I just thought, why not? I had no fear. My instructor was absolutely furious because I hadn’t followed procedures. But it turned out okay: I was the top skydiver in our platoon and was soon asked to join the regimental free-fall skydiving team. Alas, my OC—Officer Commanding—at the time had other plans for me, so it never came to be. Instead, I’ve gotten to live out my fantasy of flying by watching the birds.

  All our ravens can fly. The great risk, of course, is that they might fly away. This is the real challenge for the Ravenmaster: how to allow the birds to be as free and as wild as possible, yet to encourage them to remain here at the Tower. It’s a balancing act, and one that I’ve struggled with over the years.

  * * *

  In the old days the Ravenmasters used to trim both the primary and secondary flight feathers of one wing on all the birds. (Primary feathers are the largest of the flight feathers and help propel the birds in flight. The secondary feathers help sustain the birds in flight.) Trimming the wings in this way effectively grounded the ravens, which is one way of doing things. I take a different approach. I think the birds deserve as much freedom as I can possibly give them. I remember visiting a zoo many years ago and watching the tigers pacing restlessly up and down inside their cages. They looked so sad and bored, it broke my heart. You might argue that by keeping the ravens at the Tower at all we’re restricting their freedom just like those tigers’, and that’s true. But then you might say the same about any animal or bird or fish or creature of any kind that’s kept and cared for in any circumstances other than in the wild.

  As Ravenmaster, I believe it’s my job to maintain the tradition of the ravens living at the Tower, but it’s also my job to ensure that the traditions are managed in a way that’s appropriate for the twenty-first century. I believe that our ravens act as ambassadors for ravens worldwide, reminding the public of the importance and role of birds in our lives. If you grant that there’s a good reason to keep the birds here, then the only real question is how to do it.

  So how do I keep the birds here? I certainly don’t break their wings, as I once heard a visiting tour guide suggest. Nor do I pluck out their flight f
eathers when they’re young to stop them from growing back. And I most certainly do not drug them in order to prevent them from flying. Unlikely as any of those explanations sound, I have heard even more unlikely explanations and conspiracy theories over the years: that the birds are tagged and electronically controlled, or that we have some sort of force field around the Tower. Some people even ask if the ravens are real.

  If they’re not, I’m out of a job.

  When I became the Ravenmaster, I realized through trial and a lot of error and by following my own instincts that it was unnecessary to continue trimming the birds’ primary and secondary feathers all the way back. What I do instead is trim the feathers as little as possible, depending on the size and weight of the bird and the season. In the summer I let their flight feathers grow almost to the point that they’re in full flight, and then in the winter, because I like to be able to keep an eye on them throughout the dark and cold months, I trim a little more. I always trim a paired female’s feathers slightly more than her male counterpart’s, because I know the male will follow the female wherever she goes, so the paired males are almost always in full flight. And Merlina, because she’d been humanized—or imprinted—before she came to us, and because we’ve spent so many years now together, I trim very little, if at all, partly because it doesn’t matter how much flight feather I trim from her, she’ll always find a way of getting up onto the rooftops.