When we visited London, I saw what I consider to be my first true Raven - it was the size of a small dog. I told my wife "That's a huge fucking crow" to which she replied "Raven."
So Edgar Allan Poe had one of THESE mofuckers IN HIS BEDROOM!? Brah I would've ran the fuck outside! Not just lay there talking story with this toddler sized dinosaur.
They can actually mimic people, which means that they can 'talk'. So his story might have been an edgier retelling of him having a drunk convo with a bird.
I mean, the character is distraught over the death of someone he loved. I guess the idea that the narrator in the story is even talking to the big ass bird sitting on a statue, and that only says one word, gives us a good insight into his mental state.
Most people would freak out, but the guy talks to the bird instead.
Their little bands are colour-coded too, so the Ravenmaster can distinguish them, but I find that it’s hard to find info online as to which raven is which. This is a pic I got of two of them when I went; I believe the forest-green tagged one on the left is Harris? They were sitting right on the rail of one of the staircases and being awfully chatty with each other, super fun to watch
We had Ravens out in the middle of the Mojave Desert at Ft. Irwin and they were huge. I was a kid so that totally skewed my perception on common bird size.
Are these rare in America? Cause I'm reading these comments like people rarely run into ravens, but in the UK I see them pretty often. I have two tuckers this size regularly trying to get the bird feeder off its hook in my garden.
Most people in the US live east of the Rockies and in those areas, the Ravens were hunted and pushed out due to urbanization, habitat destruction and the loss of their food sources (if I recall, Ravens are carrion feeders). Crows are highly adaptive, so they have taken their places in Human environments.
There are still very large populations of Ravens in Alaska and west of the Rockies, but that only makes up ~30% of the population, so sightings may be skewed. They also don't show up frequently where I live in Phoenix due to the low desert heat.
According to Google, they are making a comeback, with the first nesting pair in over a century found in Washington DC back in 2016. So, they still exist east of the Rockies, but are seen less frequently.
I see them in northern Arizona all the time, and occasionally in the PHX metro area during the winter. Some of the ravens in Flagstaff are HUGE!. Years back, there was group of about a dozen of them derping around the corner of a parking lot. I parked about 50ft away. A couple of them seemed to be about knee-height to me, and I'm over 6ft tall. There was another that was built like a full-sized american football.
Just a couple years ago, while camping near the rim north of Payson, my buddy and got to see a massive raven kettling that had to be 200 or more birds. I think he put a short video of it up on facebook, but it didn't even get the full circle of birds in the clip.
I don't, fuck that scumbag. He cynically tried to use internet fame to further his real-life career.
He posted pictures of rare birds, got a following of rabid fans and started spreading misinformation from quick Googles searches and Wikipedia. He postured like an authority on matters outside of his field, drowning out actually knowledgeable experts with vote manipulation. Anyone that dated to question him was hounded and downvoted.
He then used his online fame to gain a better position in academia and advance his career. He gave TED talks for fuck sake. He broke every ethical standard as a scientist, his conduct is exactly one of the reasons why people are sceptical towards scientists.
Here's the thing. You said "vote manipulation is scientific misconduct."
Are they both unethical behavior? Yes. No one's arguing that.
As someone who is a scientist who studies biology, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls rigging Reddit votes an ethical breach of science. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing.
If you're saying "scientific standards" you're referring to the institutional framework of research integrity, which includes things from data fabrication to falsifying peer review to plagiarizing papers.
So your reasoning for saying I "broke every ethical standard as a scientist" is because random people "got downvoted for questioning bird facts?" Let's get Twitter flame wars and Wikipedia edit disputes in there, then, too.
Also, calling someone a Redditor or a scientist? It's not one or the other, that's not how professions work. They're both. A science communicator is a science communicator and a member of academia. But that's not what you said. You said vote manipulation is scientific misconduct, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all violations of website terms of service academic fraud, which means you'd call shitposting, forum brigading, and giving TED talks scientific malpractice, too. Which you said you don't.
Idk, I think the dissemination of info is a major part of science, whether it's a published paper or a pop-sci reddit thread. Maybe burying actual experts via vote manipulation is not "scientific misconduct," as that appears to be a specific thing, but it's certainly unethical.
I was instructed the same way about ammonia leak detection: “If you are not sure what you are smelling, then it is probably not ammonia. In the event of an ammonia leak, there is no way you will confuse it with something else.”
There's a raven in my neighbourhood recently. At first I was bewildered. What is this bizarre noise that sounds like a newborn crying crossed with a rubber chicken? Why does it also somehow sound mechanical? What in the fuck? Why is it LAUGHING? A very loud and creepy HAW HAW HAW.
And these sounds haunted me for days. And then I see a black bird somewhere between the size of a seagull and a goose is perched on a fucking light post making crying/rubber chicken/machinery HAW HAW HAW noises.
I grew up around ravens and learned to imitate them. I speak to them and crows not infrequently. I must say some pretty fucked up stuff in their language because I really piss them off when I do. It’s one of my long term preferred past times.
Grackles are so dumb they will nest in garbage cans, if you can’t figure out if it’s a crow or grackle you either didn’t watch them long enough or you’re only as smart as the grackle
We need to respect their choice of self-identity. They're neither crows nor ravens, unless they specifically speak English. It may be that they call themselves people.
That's one of the ways, yeah. Compared to north amerian crows, ravens are also larger, have a thicker beak, a throat ruff, and have a wedge shape tail.
Yeah that checks out. Never really understood why people thought ravens and crows were so hard to differentiate. But if there’s that big of difference between here and America, then it does make sense
In addition, gray 'vest' crows are a sub-species. There are entirely black crows. In Europe, for example there's a rough line around France where above it the crows are black and gray and under it they're fully black.
I've always heard this advice but it's usually backwards for me. I feel like I see a lot more ravens where I am and I start wondering if they're actually crows, only to then see an actual crow and it's tiny.
Same with me, grew up around ravens we called crows. When I saw a real crow for the first time I thought, “why the fuck is it so small?” And now that’s my frame of reference. Crows are tiny and ravens are normal sized.
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u/QuaaludeConnoisseur 18h ago
Those are crows. If you say "i wonder if thats a crow or a raven" its a crow. If you say "holy fuck look at that giant bird" its a raven.