CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
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@bill good spot and good description, I spotted they are constructing very high fences out the Whang from Balerno, possibly for keeping the deer in.
Also all the way up into the pentlands from green cleuch. So may be some tax break involved too.
Think the Whang Time Trial may be rescheduled given all the mist
Watched a crow on Drum Street pulling rubbish out of a bin, throwing it on the ground, checking for anything edible, then going back for the next item out of the bin. After a few attempts it got what looked to be an unopened packet of crisps. It then perched on a roof, held the bag down with one foot and stabbed at it with its beak until it got at the crisps.
I regularly see less intelligence being displayed by drivers on Drum Street.
Watched a crow emerge from the bin on the forecourt of the Tesco petrol station in Lochgilphead on Saturday with a prize. I hope it was crisps and this is a wave of spontaneous crow audacity.
Opened curtains this morning.mmassive Raven in tree at bottom of garden. Went down to put kettle on and it was sitting on fence outside the kitchen window. Not scared. Unlike birds without frontal cortex, the corvids can tell when we are behind glass in the zoos they have constructed for us.
Slightly disappointing that it's sitting on a fence post and not on a pallid bust of Pallas just above your chamber door.
Are you sure it was a raven and not a monstrous crow?
Poe's Raven has flown, Nevermore to return as Mrs Garto is out the back preparing to spray stabiliser onto a roughcast wall. Prior to painting it yellow.
IT could have been an enormous House Crow, stowaway from India. Did have a sort of Pom Pom hairdo, big big beak very pale coloured beak with gnarly bits.
Balerno has many species of corvids. Jackdaws probably my Favourite.
Hmm, pale coloured beak sounds more like a rook to me. Ravens have very black beaks. Black. Black. Black! Like the clouds of death that follow me into the Forest of Doom! And hide in the wardrobe of darkness! Black! Like the endless blackness of space! That leads to the chasm of clams!
Ravens can grow up to 1.5kg. Once, while climbing on Ben A'an, I misguidedly essayed a "classic" route which turned out to have been used as a nest site by a pair of ravens. Fortunately they were not in residence (either they hadn't used it that year, or the sprogs had already fledged): I didn't fancy trying to fend off a large angry bird with a big pointy beak while teetering over a precipice with nothing more than a big pile of dry sticks and some heather roots* to hold on to...
* These latter being fairly typical of what you have to make shift with as 'holds' on many "classic" Scottish mountain routes.
Yes Very very large Rook. Is now my favoured option. I mean bigger than 49cm though which Kilian Mullarney et al have as upper limit. They are saying a Raven is bigger than a buzzard. Really?
If you head to the Covenanter's Grave from the access point on the Lang Whang just west of the B7008 turn. You follow the poles then get to a style that has ladders on either side. At the top of this is a crows nest. I say crow, maybe rook or indeed Raven or magpie. Loads of shiny glass bits in the rather flat construction.
This style sees such little action it is now almost 100 per cent the corvids property.
What is difference between a Corvid and a passerine?
Blacker than priests' socks?
Darker than a black steer's tucus on a moonless night?
What is difference between a Corvid and a passerine?
Corvids are a subset of passerines. Passerines have a ligament that tightens the foot's grasp if it turns, which means their feet are self-stabilising when perched.
Raptors have cable-tie feet that actually require effort to release once clamped on a victim.
Birds of prey are smaller than you think when you see them up close? I have watched a (very brave) raven trying to pull an eagle's tail in flight. They are big.
@gembo: Kilian Mullarney et al ... are saying a Raven is bigger than a buzzard. Really?
The RSPB would agree:
Raven bird facts | Corvus Corax (Linnaeus was quite fond of the occasional bit of onomatopoeia, especially where birds were concerned e.g. Upupa epops for the Hoopoe. In both that case and the Raven he apparently formed the binomial by combining the ancient Latin and Greek words for the bird. So I suppose it was actually the ancients who started the idea.)
Buzzard bird facts | Buteo buteo (Which reminds me of one of my favourite bits of bird-related trivia: when Peter Adolph was denied the use of the name "Hobby" for his newly invented game, he instead trademarked the specific name of the small raptor of the same name: Falco subbuteo.)
As IWRATS says, Ravens are big birds. Hence why I was relieved not to come face to face with one half way up one of Ben A'an's craggy bits. If you see a crow performing aerobatics - in particular a tucked-wing half roll and recovery - then it's very likely actually a not-yet-fully-grown young raven working on perfecting its courtship display flight. (Another good diagnostic for ravens in flight is the distinctively wedge-shaped tail.)
I have come face to face with a fulmar, on the cliffs at Aberdour. Although a much smaller bird than a raven, they do have a quite effective defence mechanism when disturbed on the nest, of regurgitating some of their foul-smelling fishy stomach contents over you. Fortunately the fulmars at Aberdour seem to be quite habituated to climbers stepping gingerly past their nests.
Back on my first big bike tour, down the northern bit of the American Pacific Coast, I saw a good few crows engaged in tormenting bald eagles. The crows generally seemed to be getting the best of it. I also had my rubbish pillaged by steller's jays several times. Gorgeous but noisy and persistent.
Mullarney et al give the buzzard wingspan max as 2 cm longer than the buzzard wing span max but the length of a Raven is in excess of the buzzard.
There was some good bird action during the Scottish Greens Spring Conference over the weekend as they flew back and forth in front of the window of the main lecture theatre (aka spaceship) at Edinburgh Napier Craiglockhart Campus.
@ejs
Here?
The raven in that RSPB drawing does not have a black beak. They also give the wingspan as bigger than a buzzard and describe the bird as massive
I'll see your buzzards and ravens and raise you a red kite or two:
I counted 31 but there were probably 50 or a hundred altogether, in the Elan Valley in Wales last week.
Red kites big in North Wales, have also seen them in Dumfries and Galloway and indeed Minorca where they call them Milano.
Red Kites are bigger then Ravens and therefore bigger than buzzards. Red kites and buzzards have small talons
@gembo: The raven in that RSPB drawing does not have a black beak.
Well, it is a drawing, not a photograph. (I think the artist has tried to depict its sheen, and to differentiate that from the gloss of the plumage).
The Wikipedia article on the common raven says: "Apart from its greater size, the common raven differs from its cousins, the crows, by having a larger and heavier black beak, shaggy feathers around the throat and above the beak, and a wedge-shaped tail."
Fitter and Richardson say: "All black; very stout black bill; black legs."
Basically, a noticeably pale bill on a larger corvid would be generally regarded as a distinguishing feature of a rook, barring other features (including the environment in which it was seen and its observed habits and behaviours) which could indicate a raven with an unusual variation in colouring. Rooks also tend to have very distinct feathery "trousers" - the feathers at the top of the legs on crows and ravens tend to be much sleeker. A characteristic of the raven which isn't shared by the other corvids is the patch of elongated feathers on the throat, which can make it look as if it has a kind of pouch there (it doesn't).
If you watch last night's episode of Born to be Wild, about the SSPCA's wildlife rescue centre (iPlayer link) one of the creatures featured is a juvenile raven that had broken its wing after falling from its nest. You get some very good views of its beak in that. If you look closely you can see the small hook that it has on the end of its bill: I don't think any of the other resident UK corvids have that.
@chdot: Sorry, I don't immediately recognise that. The crag is listed in the guidebooks as The Hawkcraig. It's the headland out beyond the Room with a View hotel/restaurant that's accessed using the lane that runs from the back corner of the Silver Sands car park (although most climbers park up at the end of the road that runs to the lighthouse because it's a shorter walk). The particular fulmar encounter I was thinking of occurred somewhere in the chimney area, possibly on the Chimney Arete route, or further east on The Lilly or Toerag's Wall.
@gembo: Following the reintroduction programme back in the ?1980s/1990s? red kites are common all through the Cotswolds and the Chilterns. My pal who lives in Harpenden (near St Albans) sees them regularly from his rear windows. In Scotland I've seen one near Loch Quoich, and at Yellowcraig beach - in that instance the crows that hang around in the break of conifers at the north end of the Archerfield gold course were not at all happy about its presence. It was the racket they were making that alerted me that something a bit out of the ordinary was going on. There is a red kite viewing centre near Doune but I've never been there.
My most unexpected red kite sighting was from a taxi as I was being driven past Roundhay Park in Leeds!
It's a far cry these days from my youth, when birders made pilgrimages to mid Wales to try to see some of the few red kites left in the UK.
They are impressive birds, and difficult to mistake once you've had a good sighting of one. (For some reason the distinctive wing shape makes me think of the way that Airbus wings separate in to multiple segments as the plane is coming in to land.)
Yes, but this was close to RwV.
Two herons on the canal last night and this morning. They were both on the far bank, one opposite Hailes Quarry Park and the other between the bridge to Colinton and Slateford Aqueduct last night. Oddly, both of them were on the near bank this morning, within about 50 metres of one another, between the bridge to Colinton and the rail bridge. One is distinctly smaller than the other so I wonder if they are related, the smaller one presuambly being the offspring of the larger, which is why they tolerated being so close to one another?
Or maybe they're getting to know each other..?
Perhaps!
Think I possibly saw the same herons on my way to work today. Thrilled to see them so close.
The Heriot-Watt Swans look like they are starting to construct a new nest on the island in The Loch.
@chdot: Many thanks for posting that link to the HMS Tarlair book. Fascinating stuff. I'd never realised that there was so much going on out on the point during the war. (That area is where most climbers usually park up, on summer evenings, anyway, then scramble across the rocks and down in to the little inlet wherein resides the entertainingly named and rather fun VDiff Welly Wall to get to the base of the climbs - when the tide is low enough, anyway.)
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