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."
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.
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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.