Country diary: The ravens here are heard but not seen | Derek Niemann

Frome, Somerset: Driven out from here centuries ago, they are a presence once more – just don’t expect an easy sightingLost 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”. Continue reading...