No kitty.

[camwyn]

Odd. The cat was only hanging around here for three days, but I miss the fact that she's not yowling outside the door, or the window, or wherever. She was cute, and I liked her. I wish I could've taken her home... ah, well.

On a side note, for a few weeks before the cat showed up, there was a crow that would land in a specific tree outside the Chapter and periodically let loose with a noise. I'd say it was cawing except that the sound had none of the harshness I associate with a 'caw'. It sounded rather like a nasal sort of 'ha' noise, no real roughness to it. I could hear it all the way across the parking lot. Reminded me a bit of the raven that said 'hello' to me when I was on Vancouver Island. (I'm serious. I visited the island summer of 2000, and when I was in Tofino, I heard something saying 'hello, hello, hello' from behind me. I turned around expecting to see someone with a cleft palate, as it sounded very odd - but the only thing there was a large black bird on a phone wire, and it kept right on saying it before taking off.)

The crow wasn't there during the days the cat showed up. I would've noticed that sound when I was in the parking lot. The cat's gone now, and the crow's back.

Starting to wonder about totemic foo.

Comments

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

I promised myself if I ever got married again and held a wedding dinner, I would have the first course served to the strains of "The Immortals". The food would be that formidable.

[camwyn]

Let me know if you decide to go through with it. Not even in the movies have I seen a man turn as red as my professor did at my Foods Prep II final, when he tried the nam pla prik I'd made with peppers from my own garden. I was the only student whose dinner he ate in its entirety, too, instead of a few bites to test it out. Got an A. Been considering chucking this whole computer nonsense and going into the catering biz...

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Are you sure it wasn't a raven?

-- Lorrie

[camwyn]

Honestly? I don't know. It's a good-sized black bird and I know that my office is directly under a major flightpath for a very large murder of crows that generally flies over en masse for about fifteen or twenty minutes (it takes that long for all of them to pass) every evening around sunset. I am not wise enough in the ways of corvidae to tell the difference; I only know that my area is not, shall we say, especially renowned for its population of ravens.

(Trans.: I didn't think we had ravens in this state, so I assumed this bird was a crow. Whereas Vancouver Island is practically the southern gateway to Raven's spiritual realm.)

Ravens? In Jersey? Moooooooo...

[lwood.livejournal.com]

(sorry, there's a local dairy called Berkeley Farms whose slogan is: "Cows? In Berkeley? Mooooooo..." anyway!)

They're not as common there as they are out here, but they do happen! I threw "raven" and "New Jersey" at Google and got the following:

• It's listed in the list from the New Jersey Bird Records Committee as #291. You have a bird records committee?
• The Voice of the NJ Audubon Society occasionally puts ravens on their Rare Bird Alert, and referenced a breeding pair at High Point State Park.
• This (http://www.otterside.com/htmfiles/r1-t.htm) has a raven in. It wasn't taken in Jersey, but it's a good underside shot and tells how to tell ravens from crows.
• There's a NJ bird checklist (http://www.state.nj.us/dep/fgw/chkbirds.htm) reporting Corvus corax as peripheral to the NJ ecosystem, but also breeding, migratory, and wintering here.

In short, yes, it's possible that that was, in fact, a raven. Especially if it was a lower, hoarser call than any crow would make.

Berkeley is hardly the Pacific Northwest, and ravens don't like especially built-up places. However, there's at least one out back of the new house, and I've grown familiar with their calls since hanging around DLP as there's a breeding pair out back of her house... not that anyone who knows DLP will be surprised by this in the slightest: she's a big-time raven person and all-round Odin head.

-- Lorrie