Corvidae  (crows, ravens, jackdaws, rooks, among others) are some of the most intelligent animals–they use tools, can solve problems with minimal trial-and-error and share information amongst their flock.

And, apparently, they enjoy playing in the snow:

One of my favourite facts is that a flock of crows is called a murder and a flock of ravens are an unkindness. And this is why grackles should be included in the family, because a flock of those are called a plague.

And they look like this:

More incredible photography of grackles by Bill Hubick.

But back to the official corvids…

Information & Trivia on Ravens & Crows

First, if you’re confused about the different types of corvids, here is a graphic to help distinguish between them:

Here is a huge version, which you need to see to appreciate the detail and effort put into this work of art.

This page has loads of quotes from the engaging and informative  In the Company of Crows and Ravens  by John M. Marzluff, Mr. Tony Angell and Professor Paul R. Ehrlich.

24Books has excellent information about the mythology around ravens.

But, if you would like more, Wikipedia to the rescue!

When the Scandinavians were invading the Anglo-Saxons, they’d fly something similar to this:

Which the Christian Anglo-Saxons thought must be imbued with the evil power of pagan idols. That’s right. Booga booga.

Here’s a little info on Charles Dickens’ pet raven, Grip , which inspired Poe’s famous poem. While on this page , you’ll find even more information (start halfway down the page, two paragraphs above this photo of the taxidermied Grip):

Speaking of Poe’s poem, the Baltimore Ravens are the only sports team to be named after a literary creation. They won some sort of sporting competition recently, I think. They have a pretty fantastic logo.

And, of course, there are the famous ravens at the Tower of London .

Whilst doing research for this post, I learned that April 27th is International Crow and Raven Appreciation Day (ICRAD, which sounds like something a corvid would say). Here is a photo set from Facebook celebrating the day (they have a set of  videos , as well.)

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has an entire page of audio and video of  ravens and crows . The reason the ‘crow’ link includes jays and magpies is because the entire corvidae family are called crows. Ravens are a type of crow, as are jays and magpies, etc.

And if you’ve ever wondered what crows get up to during the day, you can follow streetcrow on Twitter and find out.

Gifts for Fans of Crows & Ravens

Upon a Midnight Dreary has a list of great Raven and Crow gifts and decorations .

It was also from Dahlia Jane that I learned about this amazing mask :

It’s leather and the bottom of the beak snaps off, making it two masks, really. It sold last month, but perhaps if you ask nicely he’ll make another.

And something I would love (and would actually wear all the time) is this t-shirt of Huginn and Muninn (Odin’s ravens) from November Fire :

More gift ideas here .

Images of Crows & Ravens

 

 

Serinadruid has quite a few raven-themed photos

Amusing images of crows and ravens are here .

And some Raven/Crow themed wallpapers:

Finally, no post about corvids would be complete without a picture of my tattoo, which is a tribute to both Tim Burton (not his illustration, but could be) and Edgar Allan Poe:

A friend of mine described it as: ‘If Severus Snape were an animagus that’s what he’d look like.’ So… it was even more perfect than I’d originally intended.

[If an image in this post is uncredited and you know the author's name, please leave a comment.]

The Science Part of the Post

There was a bit of a kerfuffle in Russia this week. It seems a meteor exploded several miles above the earth and …things happened.

So… we didn’t see it… I know we were all paying attention to the incredibly unimaginatively named 2012 DA14*, but a bit more attention to the things that could seriously bollocks up a well-populated area would be appreciated. After all, if outer space sends us an event that’s going to mess up Earth’s shit, there’s not a lot we’ll be able to do about it so let’s focus on things we can affect.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy

This is a very interesting page about the last time a (really big) meteor hit Russia . Basically, it must have been scary as hell before the time of massive media telling you the rest of the world wasn’t under attack by blue light fire throwers capable of breaking things forty miles away. So, though your day is a thousand times more bizarre than you’d expected, it wasn’t the beginning of an alien invasion or the end of the world.

Weather Underground has a great article with more information and photos and video, as well.

*I know that there are quadrillions of bodies in space and astronomers are very busy and don’t have time to name all of them, but if something is going to have any real impact (sorry) on Earth, give it a name a person can shout at the sky whilst clinching their fists in frustration. They should name them based on size, speed, and weight, as well as possible consequences; if it could do an enormous amount of damage it’d be a Class A Fuckton meteor with an appropriate name like Ragehorn or Titanium Handgrenade.

The Technology Part of the Post

You know how, sometimes you want information on a medical problem and you go to Wikipedia and MYGODMYEYESWHYYYYY!

There, in front of you are the most horrific, psychically scarring images outside of a Saw film. At least with gore-porn films, you expect it & you know it’s not real. But no one needs to know what an excised verruca looks like. After my husband and I finished gagging and cringing and lamenting our lack of eye-bleach over the aforementioned photos, we found Hide Images . It’s an extension available for Firefox, Chrome and Safari and will hide images, logos, backgrounds, videos, iframes (Facebook boxes, YouTube, etc.), and multimedia/flash objects.  Click on the button whilst the page is loading and it removes all images before they’ve had a chance to make you regret every life decision that’s led you to the moment of seeing those images. Click the button again and the images return. It’d be nicer if you could tell the extension to load all pages from a site without images initially, but I’m happy to no longer fear vomiting on my laptop because I wanted to learn something new.

With our tax refund I’m getting a subscription to Poe Forevermore , the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe from Library of America, and a Kindle Fire.

Its primary use will be reading comics, but I’d like to check out free apps. So please share your recommendations.

Yay! Kindle Fire!

Yay! Edgar Allan Poe!

Yay! Not being killed by a meteor!

According to this BBC news article.

In Mary Roach’s book Spook she talks about a scientist who can recreate hauntings by stimulating a certain part of the brain. This is similar, except it’s out-of-body, walk-towards-the-light sorts of things rather than dead-Aunt-Marge-is-haunting-me-because-I- broke-that-goblet.

And not that Believers will care (I use the capital B because the people who believe believe with a B) but I died once. No light, no nothing. Just conscious, drowning, then being conscious again.

The thing that surprises me about the article–or any scientific discovery of this sort–is the note of shock. It seems to me that everything will eventually be explained by science and the sensible response to the type of discovery in the article would me, ‘Seat of Out-of-Body Experiences Discovered’.

It also seems a given that once hauntings could be explained scientifically every rational human would stop believing in ghosts.

Or perhaps we did.