Injured raven, or….?

Sometimes you feel like you were especially called and chosen.  For a specific task, or moment in time.  I felt like that upon arriving back home from a trip one February afternoon. 

We had gone out of town for a couple days.  Whenever we leave the homestead, it’s Murphy’s Law that whatever can possibly happen, will happen the moment you leave the house.  Despite all the preparations that you make to ensure that nothing amiss could arise.  And for us here in Kentucky during the winter, that usually involves chickens and either the gate to their coop closing accidentally, or perhaps their water freezing over.  Or a rogue hawk deciding to wreak havoc.  Or a pop-up lightning storm that scares your watch dog into running 2 miles away.  You name it.

So, arriving back from being gone for a just a few days always leaves me a bit anxious as to what we’ll find as we pull back into our driveway.  This particular return trip was in February.  So it was cold and blustery.  Our plan was to unload the car, and then my husband would quickly head back out so that he could join in the celebrations for a friend’s 100th birthday.  Those events only come around every once in a while.  We didn’t want to miss it.  But I had been recovering from a little cold, and didn’t want to share that with the birthday boy, so I decided to stay home. 

Off my husband drove back down the driveway after only being back home for a few minutes.  As I commenced with surveying the state of affairs back at home, I noticed something lurking near the back of our driveway along the treeline.  I didn’t especially think anything of it, as I was busy counting all our chickens just to make sure we still had the same number that we did upon trip departure.  “One, two, three….twenty two.  Wait, did one of our chickens hurt her wing?” I thought to myself.  I began to walk over to take a closer look.  This chicken was walking funny, with one wing hanging awkwardly down.   It was one of our black chickens.  But no, we didn’t have any black chickens. 

I walked hesitatingly closer.  This might not have been our chicken, but was this somebody else’s chicken?  It was the same size as ours.  Was it from a neighboring flock somewhere?  Through the woods sometimes we can hear the call of a neighbor’s rooster.  And when I say neighbor, there aren’t any houses within a quarter mile of ours.  But still, the call of a rooster carries.  It’s not beyond reason that it could have gotten lost and wandered through the woods looking for another sheltering home.

Was this a chicken at all?  No, it wasn’t.  And what had happened to its wing?  I was still bundled up in my jacket.  Again, it was cold.  This shivering bird just kind of stood there.   I could tell it was hurting.  Cold, hungry probably.  Hurting.  I pulled out my trusty phone for a quick Google search.  Was it possible that a highly intelligent Raven had happened upon our home, injured from some random fall, or fight and needed my help? 

What does this one look like to you?

How about this one? Similar?

Can you identify this one?

So very similar looking…

I have always thought that having an intelligent bird as a pet would be so fun.  One that I could interact with and teach funny sayings that it would repeat back to me.  As a teenager I had been given a cockatiel bird.  It was older, and its previous keepers were too transient to spend quality time with it.  I liked the idea of becoming besties with this new friend.  Alas, despite my sporadic attention, this cockatiel never said anything to me.  It just looked at me, spread seed hulls all over my room and pooped up a storm in its cage.

But this!  This would be totally different, I was sure.  Upon confirming my suspicions using Google, that this was a Raven, I came back into the house, prepared the Raven its favorite foods, such as raw egg, fresh blueberries and nuts, and then went back outside with the goodies to feed it.  Because who doesn’t feel better after eating some yummy snacks?  My plan was to keep this injured bird in our woodshed, which I thought would be the perfect convalescent location.  Even if nurturing it’s broken wing back to health would likely take 6-8 weeks of hands-on attention and care.  I was already committed!  I just had to break the news to my husband when he got home.

The raven didn’t immediately take to the food offerings, much to my surprise.  But maybe it just needed to get settled in a little more.  I gave it another 30 minutes or so.  Coming back out to check on it, I decided to put my winter gloves on since nightfall was coming on and the temps were dropping.  The raven was still hunched in the same spot.  Food bowl untouched.  I thought maybe I’d put the food a bit closer to its mouth so it could smell it better.  Closer.  Closer still.  “Ouch!”  That thing bit the snot out of my finger.  “Phew!”  I thought.  “Good thing I had my gloves on!”  Had I not been gloved, I think that bite might have broken the skin on my finger right through the glove itself.  “That was a mighty bite.  I didn’t know ravens had such strong jaws” was running through my mind. 

And then, slowly, ever so slowly a new thought began to dawn in my mind.  “What if this isn’t in fact a raven.  What if this is a…..Vulture?!  No, this couldn’t be a vulture.  It looks nothing like a vulture.  Vultures are horribly ugly, with bald heads, and much bigger than this.”  Awe, but what if it was a vulture.  A baby vulture.  There is a transmission tower behind the treeline within eyeshot of our house.  And each evening as sunset is fading, about 40-50 vultures fly there to roost for the night.

Well, this baby injured vulture doesn’t sound like the adventure in bird raising that had initially excited me.  Because at the end of this quest, we would have a vulture hanging around way too close for comfort.  And eeewwww, I would have to feed it dead things. 

“But you know, it’s dark and these online pictures of ravens and baby vultures look so closely the same, I’m just going to wait to talk it over with my husband when he gets home,” I decided.  When he did arrive back home later that night, I was all a buzz reciting the details of the hours while he was away.  When he followed me out to the woodshed to see this “probably an injured raven” bird, he took one look at the beak and said “that’s a vulture!”  No intelligent, trainable clever ravens here.

“Well now what are we going to do with it?” I asked?  He looked a bit closer at the break in its wing and said we’d need to put it out of its misery soon.  That it wouldn’t be right to just let it suffer.  The next morning, we took it out to the snow-covered field and shot it.  Once and done.  No squawk, no movement.  I actually think that when we found it, it had probably been close to the end already.  But hopeful excitement is sometimes blinding.

Now out here in the country there are lots of “clean up” animals.  Coyotes, hawks, owls, vultures.  I’ve even seen a deer that a nearby hunter had shot, that ran onto our property and died, get picked clean by the aforementioned clean-up crew in less than 24 hours.  Nothing but bones in breakneck speed.  Nature’s way of recycling.  In the case of this now dead vulture, since it was February, which here represents the very heart of winter scarcity, I was sure that the carcass would be gone by the next morning.  Nope.  And I was acutely aware that the thing was still lying there in the field, because my dog could see it from our house and kept barking and barking and barking at the offending visitor to his territory. 

I kept thinking how relieved I would be as soon as some passing coyote would notice this thing and carry it off.  Not the next day, or the next day, or the next day.  Still there.  And I should add that the bird’s broken wing was somehow fixed in an upward flag position as it lay there in the snow.  A black frozen flag.  Almost like the bird was flipping us….well, the bird.  You know how they say that “no good deed goes unpunished?”

In hindsight, what lessons did we learn from this particular homestead happening?  I often find myself asking this very question.  I say “often,” since things like this occur seemingly all the time.  And learning is part of the process.  Trial and error. 

Is it important to shelter the weary?  Yes.  Do unexpected surprises frequently involve you whether you want them to or not?  Yes.  Can’t I just ignore it and hope it goes away?  Usually no.  And sometimes you have to make hard decisions.  And sometimes, you just have to make those hard decisions.