October 2025
Bad News Birds?
BY REBECCA (RJ) WARREN
October is a fitting month to consider two corvids, the raven and the crow, birds that feature in Halloween displays of spiderwebs and skeletons. We’d hardly expect to find a Tufted Titmouse perched on a faux headstone in a Halloween tableau, but do ravens and crows deserve their eerie reputation? True, the corvids are larger than most songbirds, perhaps more imposing, and they use calls and mimicry to communicate rather than melodious songs, but they are also uniquely curious and intelligent birds. Studies of the American Crow, common here in East Tennessee, show that they are capable of human facial recognition (and will remember which humans treated them kindly or unkindly).1 Crows also have strong group bonds. One-year-old crows will often stay behind with their parents to rear the next set of offspring.2
We can see the American Crow in our yards and possibly at our tray or platform feeders, but the Common Raven is usually found only in the mountains along the North Carolina state line at elevations that exceed 2700’, according to the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. The American Crow is often mistaken for a raven, but a raven is larger (25% so, Richard Crossley records in his ID Guide) with a bigger bill. Meanwhile, the Common Grackle is sometimes mistaken for the American Crow, a misconception that is easily corrected when the Grackle’s pale eye-ring is noted, which Crossley, in an funny lapse from his scientific language, describes as contributing to a “‘bad boy’ look”.3
If the raven is considered a harbinger of ill to some, the poem by the same name was not for its author: with the publication of “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe attained acclaim as a poet. 4 A narrative poem, it is told by a narrator or “speaker” whom we will assume here is a male. The suspense of what will happen to the man who is attempting to rationalize the noises he hears outside his room propels the reader along stanza by stanza in the same way suspense pushes the novel reader to flip the page or the Netflix viewer to let the series keep rolling into the next episode.
The source of the noise is “a stately raven”5 that steps through the window into the man’s room. At first, he is amused by the bird, and begins talking directly to it. The exchange begins harmlessly enough, with the speaker asking the bird its name and getting the response, now famous: “Nevermore.” But then the man begins using the raven like a Magic 8 ball, asking it high-stakes questions to which it always answers with the refrain of “Nevermore.” Hearing “nevermore” in response to whether he will reunite with his lost “Lenore” in a blissful afterlife enrages the speaker. The raven that had amused him before becomes a “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!”.6 Why blame the bird? I think when I read this poem. He knew what the raven was going to say. Perhaps he should have asked something like, “Will I ever have to help a friend move again?” We bird-lovers don’t blame the bird. We recognize that every species has a part to play, even the so-called “bad boys.”
- Sibley, David Allen. What It’s Like to Be a Bird. (Knopf, 2020), 105.
- Sibley, 105.
- Crossely, Richard. The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds. (Princeton University Press, 2011), 511.
- Hollander, John. American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. (Library of America, 1996), 939.
- Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Raven,” in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, edited by John Hollander (Library of America, 1996), 241.
- Poe, in Hollander, 243.