31 Ravens and Crows
About this episode
Not every black bird is the same once you know what to look and listen for. Sean Dooley from BirdLife Australia shares how to identify Australia’s ravens and crows by sight and call.
Episode illustration: Australian Raven
Sean Dooley is the National Public Affairs Manager for BirdLife Australia, author of The Big Twitch, and former holder of the Australian Big Year twitching record. For many years, Sean and his team have been working tirelessly to ensure that birds are protected and loved by Australians. That's why he is affectionately known as 'the Birdman' and we reckon he’s a national treasure.
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Kirsty: This episode of Weekend Birder was recorded on the country of the Wurundjeri people of the Eastern Kulin Nation. I would like to pay my respects to Elders past and present. The Wurundjeri people's living culture continues to have a unique and important role in Naarm, which is the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung word for Melbourne.
Kirsty: This is Weekend Birder, a podcast that shares birdwatching stories and advice. I'm your host, Kirsty Costa, and I'm as pleased as punch to be joined again by Sean Dooley from BirdLife Australia. He is back to talk about one of the most requested topics from Weekend Birder listeners, Australian Ravens and crows. Before we launch into this very interesting topic, here is what Sean has been up to since we last heard from him.
Sean: Possibly the most exciting, memorable birding moment I've had since we last spoke was I was fortunate enough to attend at the start of February, the Bittern Conservation Summit, which was held in Leeton, which is one of my favourite parts of the world in New South Wales in the Riverina. And I believe you had Matt Herring on who organised this, along with the New South Wales Local Land Services, and it was really great to be up there talking about bittern conservation. But the real highlight was there was a field trip element to it and I couldn't fit on the bus. There were so many people going out to these. We were visiting these rice farms and looking for Bitterns and Matt was taking out the drone (the thermal imaging drone) to check out some nests that he'd found in the rice. And I was in a car behind. And as we pulled into the rice farm and we were meeting the rice farmers, the growers who were actually part of the Bitterns in Rice incentive scheme, and they were beaming with pride at what they had in their fields, which was really terrific. But as we pulled up the bus, we could see the bus in front of us had stopped. And I thought, I wonder what if they seen a bittern or something? And I just looked and I was looking out into the rice field. And then on the bank immediately next to us was an Australasian Bittern, an adult just sitting on the bank out in the open, which is just ridiculous. Like, you know, they're meant to be hidden in the reeds and booming and never, never, ever letting you see them. But this was just sitting out in the glorious still morning sunshine. And what made this encounter even more incredible was as we were watching it, the bus drove off and we stayed in watching it. And I was trying to take some photos and things and I noticed movement along the the embankment and out of the corner of my eye. And I looked and there was a massive black feral cat walking casually strolling along this embankment, and it was heading towards the bittern. And I just had my heart in my mouth as to what would happen. I assumed the bittern would be too big for the cat to take on. But you had this moment, you know, and suddenly I realized, hang on, I've got to film this. I was struggling with my to get my phone to video, and in the end, I didn't get the video, but I did get a shot of the cat and a shot of the bittern. Bittern was just sitting on the bank and as the cat approached, it did the classic bittern cryptic posture. It just stuck its head into the air and made itself very thin as if to say, "Nothing to see here. I'm just a reed", which was ridiculous because it was out in the open. But it worked! The cat literally ambled past within a metre of the bittern and just kept going. And I had my heart in my mouth thinking, you know, he's an endangered bird about to be attacked. But the camouflage technique absolutely worked in that on that occasion, which was fantastic to see. But then later on when we were at the rice fields themselves and Matt was checking a nest with the drone that he'd had, I think it was three eggs, two eggs or three eggs a few weeks before, and they were gone and the adults weren't on the nest anymore. So we also saw foxes that day as well. These feral mammal predators are taking a huge toll on the birds that do come to the rice fields to breed, particularly the Bitterns are vulnerable, the chicks are vulnerable and the eggs as well. But it can also be natural. Predators like Swamp Hens will take the eggs or the or the very young chicks or Swamp Harriers. So it was a fantastic time to see to go up to that part of the world. There's still so much water in a lot of the wetlands, in the natural wetlands, as well as the rice fields. So the water bird abundance was just brilliant. At places like Campbells Swamp near Griffith and the wonderful Fivebough Wetlands, which are right on the edge of Leeton Township. And there were Australasian Bitterns there. We also had a very brief, tantalising glimpse of an Australian Little Bittern, which is really, really difficult bird to see. But then other things like the normally furtive Baillon's Crake we had one just literally feeding at our feet on the flooded track. So I just love those freshwater waterbirds. We didn't get the Australian Painted Snipe, which is one of my other absolute favorites and that Matt and BirdLife Australia are involved in the tracking project. We're hoping to get some some trackers onto the Painted Snipe. So there's been a whole range of sightings of Painted Snipes turning up across New South Wales and in Victoria just recently as well. So hopefully the Painted Snipe have had a really good breeding season after the triple La Nina because up until that point I think as talking to Maddie who said, "We had six confirmed records in the past year". And so even though the Action Plan for Australia's birds estimate says about 340 Painted Snipes left. Matt said up until a month ago, we only had evidence there were six. So hopefully these amazing fresh water birds will start popping up all around after a good breeding season in the inland.
Kirsty: If you would like to know more, tune into Episode 29, which features Matt Herring talking about the Painted Snipe and the Bitterns and Rice Project. We last heard from Sean in the lead up to the Aussie Bird Count in October 2022. Here's an update on what he and his team have learnt from the data that people submitted.
Sean: To be honest, I'm surprised we got any bird counts at all this year because that week of the Aussie Bird Count coincided with the incredible biblical torrential downpours that happened across eastern Australia and we ended up having 80,000 people involved, which was down on the previous couple of years. But considering a lot of people couldn't even get out of their houses or into their backyards because they were literally lakes, that was really amazing. Interestingly, the numbers were mainly down in both of counties and the number of birds that were subsequently counted was down in Victoria, New South Wales, but it wasn't so much so that it changed the national sort of rankings of where the birds came. The biggest move were really was the New Holland Honeyeater jumped up to 11th place in the national count and that's mainly because it's a very common bird in urban areas in Adelaide and Perth. It's found right across the country sort of I think reflects more. A higher proportion of counts were coming from South Australia and Western Australia than usual because the numbers were a bit down, particularly in New South Wales and Victoria. So that was really interesting. But I don't think that will be part of a long term trend necessarily. What we did pick up and by having this amount of big data of people who don't necessarily know that much about birds, but they learn enough about the birds in their backyards to provide information that's really valuable to us. Two things I noticed that stood out for me was the continuing drop in the rankings, at least of the Common Myna (or the dreaded 'Indian Miner' as people call it). People see this as such a huge conservation issue because they see Common Mynas like turfing out parrots from their backyard nesting boxes and things like that. And certainly where the Common Mynas are invading, the numbers are going up and the counts are going up. But overall, it's been dropping down the league rankings, so to speak, since we started the count. For instance, in 2018, it was still eighth nationally, the most eighth counted bird 2022, it was down to 12th, so it dropped out of the top ten a couple of years ago. And that might be a couple of things and it might be that we're not actually seeing fewer Common Mynas. It's just we might be seeing more of other species that are booming, like Noisy Miners and Rainbow Lorikeets. And so proportionally, they're outstripping the growth of the Common Myna. But also, I do wonder whether one of the factors behind this is potentially a side benefit of running the Aussie Bird Count is that I think one of the things we want to do at BirdLife Australia is educate people about how to identify the the birds that you see every day. Basically, we want people to get to know their neighbours and one of the things we've been doing over the years is trying to point out the difference between the introduced Common Myna and the native Noisy Miner, because even though they're from entirely different families, they have very similar names and they also have pretty much the same look. It's just a different shade of colour of their base colour. So Noisy Miners are the grey ones and Common Mynas are the brown ones. But aside from that, they have all the other colours of the beak, the head, the feet, the eyes are all very similar. And the other thing that stood out to me was the Pacific or Eastern or Common Koel. How that has increased up and gone up the rankings every year. And this year it was at its highest ranking, especially for places like the ACT and Victoria, where they were almost unheard of 20 years ago. And they're both rising up the tables because there are more and more being reported there, perhaps because of the wet weather weather they didn't show up or whether they were just a bit more silent, we don't know. But certainly the number of records of koels in that appeared in things like bird data or eBird was way down at the start of October, but by the time the count was running the third week of October, the numbers were back to normal. In fact, they were. They'd increased in almost all the places where you normally see them.
Kirsty: It's so cool to hear about the results of the Aussie Bird Count, and I feel really hopeful that citizen science will continue to inform policy decision making and also help BirdLife Australia with its campaigns. Congrats to everyone who participated and if you missed out, you'll have another chance this October. Okay, let's get on to the topic of Australian Ravens and crows. These types of birds are part of a family that's called the corvids.
Sean: Corvids are a family of birds that include crows and ravens and they're the only examples we get in Australia. But overseas, particularly in the northern hemisphere, they also include the northern Hemisphere. Totally unrelated to the Australian Magpies and things like jays and other birds, Jackdaws and Rooks and things like that. They're really fascinating and much maligned group of birds and play a very significant cultural role in many, many cultures across the world because they are scavengers. And so they've many of the species of corvids, particularly the crows and ravens have have learnt that there's a lot of free food around human settlements. So there's there a bird that have significant interactions with with humans throughout history and feature a lot in mythology. Odin in the Norse mythology, he had to I think they were ravens that would go fly around during the day to see what was happening in the world, and then report back to Odin on what all the people were up to. So and I know certainly in a lot of Indigenous songlines and other stories, the crow as it often gets called, even if they are R=ravens, feature in many significant cultural stories. An interesting bird because we know now research has shown that Australia took song to the world, the songbirds evolved here in Australia and then moved out across the rest of the world. The corvids are one of those birds that reached their greatest diversity once they moved out of here or evolved possibly outside of Australia. And then they're one of the few families of songbirds that have actually come back into Australia and we have actually have five native species of corvids and they are the crows and the ravens. We have three ravens, which are the Australian Raven, the Little Raven and the Forest Raven. And we have two crows, which is the Torresian Crow and the Little Crow. Now the tricky thing when you're starting out birding and even now I still stumble over this, is there is almost no discernible difference, not just between crows and ravens, but within those names. It can be really difficult to identify any of the five individually because essentially with a crow and a raven, it's the same basic unit. It's a large black songbird with a white eye in the adult, and pretty much that's it in terms of easy identification features. So they do pose a really challenging conundrum to birders. Sometimes I still give up unless I get a really good view. Or more importantly, and this is the tip, it's the call that's going to help you the most. The subtle variations of the corvid's call are a much better guide to distinguishing what species you have. But even there, there's lots of slippages in the way they sound. So some birds can sound like other species. The thing that works in your advantage is in most areas of Australia, we only have one dominant species particularly in our cities. This is the hill that I will die on in terms of what's a crow, what's a raven and where they occur, because there's a lot of historical inaccuracies of what people were reporting. There's sort of this legacy of misidentified birds that are in all the databases. And so if people see what claim a species in especially in their cities where they normally wouldn't be, they're able to point to this long history of, "Well, that bird has always been there". It's like, "No, it hasn't. It's actually been always misidentified". And they're so difficult to identify and separate that it wasn't until the late 1960s with research from CSIRO that we actually established that we had 5 species of corvids in Australia. Up until then it was variously just thought to be 2 or 3. Even the scientists were confused up until the late 1960s, so that's how tricky they can be. But the advantage is if you live in a city, a capital city in particular, you will have one dominant species of corvids. So I'll run through that. If you are in Perth or Sydney, the dominant species you're going to see almost exclusively is the Australian Raven. If you're in Melbourne, Adelaide and Canberra, the dominant species is the Little Raven. If you're in Hobart, the only species of corvids you'll get there is Forest Raven, and if you're in Brisbane or Darwin it's the Torresian Crow. So that's a really good rule of thumb. In some of those areas you will get more than one species. But for instance in Melbourne 99% of corvids are Little Ravens and the Australian Raven is is restricted to a very few select areas of generally taller forest habitat. So you'll get a couple of pairs out in the You Yangs near Geelong, a small population on the parts of the Mornington Peninsula and then still not as common as Little Ravens throughout the Dandenongs and other ranges. Whereas in in Sydney you will get Little Ravens, especially in the south west, particularly in winter as they move in. But generally it's Australian. Raven. That's very helpful. But the big but is there are some areas you don't just get two species of corvid, you can actually get 3 or 4 or even in parts of sort of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, within 100km you can get all 5 species. So this is where it gets tricky.
Kirsty: If you haven't listened to how Sean got into birdwatching, go back and listen to Weekend Bird Episode eight. Sean grew up near the Seaford Wetlands, and it was during this time that he became fascinated with corvids and also discovered that location is really important.
Sean: When I was in Grade Six, I got my hands. I think it was a Gould League checklist poster that I stuck up. I pushed my brothers KISS posters away off the wall and just stuck this up. And it was like a checklist, probably with 52 spots and all the birds that you could possibly see around Melbourne. It was fantastic. And I would each week I would tick off what I'd seen. This was in the first year of me starting birdwatching and it had Australian Raven and Little Raven. After about a year or so of birdwatching, I realized that I was no longer seeing Australian Ravens. In the first few months I was seeing about 50/50 Australian Ravens and Little Ravens. By the end of the year I'd noticed it had been quite a few months since I'd seen an Australian Raven and I thought that was really curious. And it only occurred to me afterwards that what had happened was I actually just got better at bird watching and identifying. I'd never seen an Australian Raven. I had just assumed I had based on sort of quite spurious characteristics, because Little Ravens can be tricky at times. And so I was very adamant from then on. And whenever people claim to have seen Australian Ravens anywhere in that, you know, that Seaford area, I was pretty, pretty bolshy about slapping them down and saying, "No, you didn't". And that view spread to most of suburban Melbourne. And then after about probably 20 to 25 years of bird watching and by this stage I was doing monthly surveys for Melbourne Water and BirdLife Australia there. And one very foggy winter's morning in July, really cold, foggy morning there after 20 years of denying there were Australian Ravens around, there was an unmistakable call of the Australian Raven. And so you can never say never, but considering I've done well over 500 surveys of those monthly surveys, you know, there is literally one record of Australian Ravens. So it very much is 99.9% Little Ravens.
Kirsty: If you go birdwatching in north eastern New South Wales or south western Victoria, you might end up seeing 2 to 5 species of Australian corvids. Each location in this case will not help you identify which bird you are seeing. So here are Sean's tips for telling them apart by sight.
Sean: The way to identify between the species. As I said, they're all basically the same corvid unit, the Forest Ravens, I think the largest and most heavy set. And the Little Crow is is the slightest. But really the differences in size are so minimal. For instance, the Australian Raven and the Little Raven, which will occur together, people say, "No, it was definitely an Australian Raven because it was big". Well, unfortunately the news is that Little Raven is a terrible name because in terms of length, the Little Raven is only one centimetre shorter than an Australian Raven. You really cannot tell on size for any of these birds. The crows do have a bit more of a a leaner appearance. They don't have the big sort of bulky belly of a of a raven. So that can sometimes be useful. It's sometimes evident, but essentially they all look the same. The Australian Raven is probably the easiest to physically identify because it has the beard. It basically has a bunch of feathers below the chin and on the throat. The hackles that it usually raises when it calls and it does look quite bearded. There's a caveat to that. It's particularly the ravens. They also have those they're just not as prominent. But Forest Raven and even Little Raven can raise their throat hackles. So you have to be careful. But usually that bearded look to the Australian Raven is a dead giveaway. But you need to see the bird really closely. Australian Raven has virtually no feathers under the chin in what's called the inter area feathering that goes right up under the beak. It's very bare in an Australian Raven. People ask about the difference between crows and ravens and really the only difference is generally ravens are larger, but that's that's a rule of thumb that applies around the world. It's not necessarily always true. The main difference is apparently it's the colour of the down at the base of the feather. So in crows it's meant to be white and in a raven it's meant to be brown. But essentially, unless it's howling a gale or you actually catch one and blow on the bird to see what the colour of the down feathers are, it's not a good ID feature.
Kirsty: Okay, so look for the beard or the bare chin of the Australian Raven or look at the colour of the down at the base of the feathers to tell crows and ravens apart (which Sean just explained is pretty tricky to do). So, friends, how are we going to identify these Australian corvids if we're in a location where they all hang out? Sean says the answer is by listening to their calls.
Sean: There is always a difference between them. Little Ravens and Australian Ravens can be a bit more fluid, but generally the Australian Raven is that classic sound of the Australian landscape. It's that long, almost sort of pained wail that goes out and it's usually in 3 or 4 notes. And a non birdwatching friend who was out with me once said it's like they're they get a surprise, ask themselves a question and then give the answer. So they've got a "Ah ah ah ahhhhhh". The Forest Raven has got the deepest call of all. It sounds like part of an Australian Raven call, but it's much more resonant, deep croak of a call. Uh, and the Little Raven tends not to have that long, elongated, elongated phrase at the end of its calls. It tends to be more staccato in its calling. Any press conference that you hear of a politician in Brisbane will always be accompanied by a Torresian Crow calling in the background. To me, they have almost a quacking quality to the call. It's a bit higher. They're constantly giving us a single note, but often that's connected together. So it might be on a bit of a loop. To me, if anything sounds a bit like a duck, it's going to be a Torresian Crow. And the Little Crow, which is found mainly in the desert areas, can be very difficult to distinguish from Torresian Crows at times, but their call tends to be a lot more flat and nasally, as someone once likened it to. It's like they're a Torresian Crow with an American accent. And if you've got an app or if you go on to a place like birds in backyards, you can listen to the separate calls and get to know the calls. You're far more readily identify the species of corvid you're you're seeing if you can hear what it's calling and know the call.
Kirsty: The bird calls that you just heard are recordings from Mark Anderson on the Xeno-canto.org website. Thanks again, Mark. We love your recordings. If you are still feeling a bit confused. Sean and his team have made a great video about how to identify Australia's corvids and I've put a link in the episode notes for you. If you look at the field guides or online guides like Bird Data or eBird, there is actually a sixth corvid that you might see called the House Crow. This is actually not an Australian native species. Sean likes to call it an accidental visitor.
Sean: It's classed as introduced because, unlike a lot of other vagrants that fly here by themselves, it's generally thought that the House Crows that have been recorded have all been ship assisted. That is this. This is the the common corvid throughout all of Asia introduced into some of those ports as well. Like I don't think they're native to South-east Asia but they're certainly around places like Singapore and Malaysia. And so they do spread and they're quite invasive and they're considered an agricultural pest as well as an invasive species that you don't want. So any reports of House Crows are treated very seriously by the various Departments of Agriculture around the country, and most of the records of House Crow are very close to major ports. I think Fremantle has the greatest number of records of House Crows that's on the Indian Ocean and obviously it's getting a lot of ships coming in from around the ports of the Indian Ocean, which are much more likely to carry House Crows on them. They follow the ships on. There's lots of food on the ships and they'll they'll just hang around and then basically jump ship. They're readily identifiable because they're quite a bit smaller and they have a sort of brownish hue on the head. They do look quite different to to the Australian native corvids, which are all very similar looking.
Kirsty: You could argue that ravens are not always loved by Australians. Farmers sometimes see them as pests. People living in suburbia watch them pull litter out of bins or feast on roadkill. And I even had a flock of ravens pull the rubber off my windscreen wipers when I lived in Adelaide. Sean says that their intelligence is why we love them or why we might fear them.
Sean: This is a bird that has, by any measure that has been studied. It has the equivalent intelligence of things like primates. The most studied one is the new Caledonian Crow. Their problem solving abilities are just phenomenal. And they will the researchers create these puzzles where the birds have to not only work out how to get into a sort of a cage where there's food, but they also have to create the tools that enable them to unlock the cage. And the new Caledonian Crow actually fashions its own tools to do things like dig grubs out of out of logs and stuff like that. So they've got impeccable intelligence credentials and you see that in Australia. Those sorts of experiments I don't think have been done on Australian species, but they are so smart, also mischievous, like we get reports a lot of ravens stealing golf balls on the golf course and for a long time it was, oh well, they must think they're eggs, but ravens aren't that dumb. They whether there's some chemical signature in the smell of the golf ball that attracts them or whether they're just, you know, just getting up to mischief, it's really hard to understand because they don't just steal white golf balls. They steal all the coloured golf balls as well, and they'll catch them. And certainly other corvids in other countries, particularly in America, some of the species there do k shiny trinkets. The Eurasian Magpie, unrelated to the Australian Magpie, is known as culturally as the thieving magpie because it will steal shiny things like coins and jewellery and puts them in their nest. So they have this cultural attribution in Australia Magpies that they're thieves, which which they aren't. They don't actually steal things from people necessarily, although ravens will. So there are other Australian birds that kind of look like they should be part of the corvid family as well. I'm thinking about birds like the White-winged Choughs and currawongs. The White-winged Chough in Australia is not only not part of the corvid family, it's not part of the Chough family, the Choughs in Europe. There's two species in Europe, the red billed Chough and the Alpine Chough. Those choughs are, I believe, part of the Crow family as well. The corvid family. Whereas the Australian Choughs are in a completely different family mudnest building group of birds. And so yeah, it's I suppose in some ways a bit of a sense of convergent or parallel evolution. The currawongs in particular, but also Magpies and choughs have have adapted very similar or have developed very similar colour schemes and body shapes. And when you look at it, particularly the currawongs, their diets are very similar to the corvids. They're omnivores, they're scavengers, they'll eat fruit, but they will also do a bit of hunting or certainly take carrion. So I guess it's convergent evolution if that's the correct technical term. I always confuse my convergent and parallel evolutions. But interestingly, the White-winged Chough, which is readily identifiable when it flies, you can see the flash of white in the wing. Interesting that their beak is not like a magpies or a ravens. It has that slight curve to it and is narrower. And that's because they're they're largely ground feeders and so they'll be probing in bark or under logs or through the leaf litter, looking for invertebrates or bulbs from things like orchids that they they can feed on. So, you know, that adaptation of the beak is a good way to identify them if they're not going to fly away from you.
Kirsty: Australia's choughs and magpies don't belong to the same corvid family as the birds with the same name as them overseas. Man this birdwatching business can be really confusing. I'm so grateful that Sean volunteered his time to explain more about Australia's corvids. I don't know about you, but I have a new appreciation for them and I will be definitely listening out for their calls now. I've also put a few links in the show notes, including Sean's video, so that you can extend your knowledge and you're also welcome to jump onto the Weekend Birder website to find out more.
