Lost in a Glen Coe blizzard, I met ravens for the first time at close quarters when I was not that long out of college. Back then, these vultures of the northern hemisphere were fixed on distribution maps exclusively as birds of the mountainous north and west, hatched in ice, feathers stiffened with granite. Ravens were indubitably tough birds of hard places – there was surely no home for them in the English home counties, nor here over the soft tops of the Mendips.
But old habitations die hard, and ravens are back to make an easier living in counties from which they were driven out centuries ago. And there appear to be few barriers – the Victorian naturalist R Bosworth Smith commented that “His dietary ranges from a worm to a whale”.
In the first weeks of late summer after we moved west to Somerset, a passing pair gave us a daily call. We might as well have named them house crows, for they were far more evident than their lesser cousins. Present, but never really here; I never once saw one touch down on a roof or a television aerial. In sodden autumn, jackdaws flocked back, and I witnessed one high-sky skirmish in which a posse harried a single raven off the skyline. I began wishing newly descended carrion crows into ravens, but weeks went by without a single confirmed sighting.
The other day, we heard what we had been missing while walking up the other side of the valley on a footpath where views are constantly interrupted by copses. A corvid call, unlike any other. The carrion crow “craic” can be playful, taunting, or complaining, but this sound was pure raven. “Krok!” – a plangent croak with a built-in echo, drawn up from the bowels of the earth. Though the ornithologist Bernd Heinrich claims ravens have more calls than any other bird, this is the one we know best. I was lost from it among the trees, but I am sure it knew I was there, just as those long-ago ravens watched over the young hill walker stranded on the snow-capped top of a Scottish mountain.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
