Tag: corvids

What’s a Corvus?

PeekingCrow

The short answer: crows and ravens are members of the genus Corvus.

Bird people refer to them as corvids, because they belong to the family Corvidae, as do magpies, jays, rooks, nutcrackers, jackdaws and a few others.

Of the corvids, only crows and ravens roost under the genus Corvus. Many species of crows and ravens fly the blue skies of Earth, but in the U.S., it’s all about the American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) and the Common Ravens (Corvus corax).

Raven or Crow?

Though they look a lot alike, crows and ravens are not of the same species, therefore they don’t mate.

Generally ravens are bigger than crows, but unless they’re hanging out together, which they do sometimes, it’s hard to tell them apart by size. Their beaks and tails are distinctive. Raven beaks are thicker and curvier than crow beaks, and their tails are wedge-shaped, as opposed to a more ‘blunt cut’ of the crow tail.

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Corvid Speech

Raven speech sounds different than crow speech. I prefer ‘speech’ to ‘calls’, because I believe they are conversing, though we don’t hear most of what they’re saying. So does Michael Westerfield, by the way, noted corvid researcher and author of Language of Crows.

Raven speech sounds more like a croaking trill. (http://www.shades-of-night.com/aviary/sounds/raven1.wav)

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AmericanCrowCrow speech to us sounds like a series of ‘caw’ sounds. (http://www.shades-of-night.com/aviary/sounds/crow2.wav)
AmericanCrow
(Corvus brachyrhynchos)

We Go Way Back…

Corvus is one of the oldest constellations in human history and resides within a group of constellations, the Crater, Hydra, and Sextans. In the Greek myth, Apollo flung the disobedient Corvus into the night sky in a fit of rage, where the thirsty Corvus gazed forever at the Crater–a two-handled cup full of water, guarded by the water snake Hydra. (Sextans is not part of this myth). (http://ow.ly/mBwtb)

urania32Corvus

The elements of the story have become obscure, but the age of the story–Aesop told it–illustrates the antiquity of the Human/Corvus relationship. Revered and reviled by gods and mortals, we are not the boss of them.

Ecofantasy?

What’s that?

It’s a state of mind…a vision of an alternative future, where all of Earth’s inhabitants have the right to be alive, each to its own individual perception of the world, and each with a unique voice that sings its own song of creation. All the animals, plants, rocks, air, and water–everyone.

Edward_Hicks_-_Peaceable_KingdomWhere the Wild Law rules…

“…wild law is a law made by people to regulate human behaviour that privileges maintaining the integrity and functioning of the whole Earth community in the long-term, over the interests of any species (including humans) at a particular time.”
—Cormac Cullinan, author, Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice

Even Rivers have the “…right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles.” (http://therightsofnature.org/ecuador-rights/)

Even unto personhood—
In 2012, New Zealand gave the Whanganui River ‘personhood rights’ (http://www.treehugger.com/environmental-policy/river-new-zealand-granted-legal-rights-person.html)

Ecofantasy

The idea of rights of nature is still an ecological fantasy in the overall human consciousness. I offer my vision of a not-too distant Earth, a planet, alive with organisms, including the entities of rock, air, water that we deem ‘non-living’ but are alive in ways we cannot fathom.

Toward this vision, I wrote my first novel, Corvus Rising, an ecofantasy of crows, humans, sentience, and the idea that we have the ability to communicate verbally across species boundaries.

 

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