The best fed raven on Gabriola

We’ve been outsmarted again! This time by a raven. We may think he’s become our “pet” over the last few years but, in fact, he’s made a pet of us. He’s trained us well. Whenever he peers at us through the window from his perch on the deck railing or swoops past my husband’s basement office to get his attention, one of us will dash to the fridge where we keep a large glass dish full of meat, poultry and fish scraps labelled “Raven,” open the patio door to tell him we’re on our way and then carry his meal to his feeding stumps at the back end of the property, under his watchful beady black eye. As soon as we are a safe distance away, he swoops in for his meal. He is big and sleek, and so well fed that he sometimes seems almost too heavy to fly.

Lately, my husband has become too lazy to walk all the way to the stumps and will put the raven’s dish on the deck where we have a “birds’ eye” view of how neatly he eats and how carefully he stacks pieces of food before flying off to his nest. (In past years, when we’d put out saltine crackers, we would marvel at how he skillfully he would stack them in fours, carefully aligning the corners before flying off with them in his beak.) He will return multiple times to clear out the dish, either to feed himself on the spot, carry bits back to the nest or cache pieces in the leaf litter on our neighbour’s roof, in our woodchip pile or even in the ground.