| Snakeadelic |
04-28-2017 07:22 AM |
There are actually two different ways to get a white raven, and I think both might be shown!
The eyes have it, as they say. The bird in flight appears to have a red or pink eye, which would mean it is a true albino. The other two have very clearly blue eyes, which means they are leucistic. Either way, AWESOME.
I spent several years "training" the local crow population to avoid the immediate area of my apartment, because the crows here are noisy and annoying and part of my anxiety/OCD is expressed in an inability to completely disconnect from my physical environment if I'm awake. The light post directly across from my apartment is still a favorite display point for birds--now we have a flicker who drums on it to declare territory, and the robins have learned to use it to direct their chirps into a U shape of buildings for amplification. But the local crows don't sit on it and caw for hours at a time the way they did when it was first put up.
And since the crows don't hang around, now we have a pair of ravens nesting nearby! I hear them more often than I see them, with their distinctive croaking "rark rark" calls as they fly past. It's easy to forget they're bigger than red-tailed hawks! No whites in the area that I know of, although about 10 years back I did see a leucistic magpie.
Great pictures, and good lifestyle info. For anyone interested in some of the weirder aspects of breeding behavior (more pair-bonding than actual sex) across the animal kingdom--but with lots and lots of bird species featured--I recommend a book called Biological Exuberance.
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