Backyard and Beyond

On January 1st, 2015, I saw two Common Ravens canoodling on an abandoned building down at the waterfront. I’d seen these large corvids in the Hudson Highlands, the Scottish Highlands, and out in the American west before this, and once or twice I’d seen them passing over this borough on the western end of Long Island. But here they were definitely on Brooklyn, Kings County, New York. Soon after, I saw one gathering sticks near Bush Terminal Park. Thus was launched the Brooklyn Ravens dynasty.

I don’t know if these are the same two birds, but this year the Sunset Park Ravens had four fledglings. (There were three seen in 2016.)

I’m afraid I don’t have any pictures, however. Their nest is remote, across a vast, fenced-in, and empty parking lot. It’s where those wreckers DeBlasio and Cuomo parked the fleet of the refrigerator trucks, mobile whited sepulchers, when local morgues were overwhelmed with Covid deaths. For months and months, the trucks gleamed in the sun, filled with hundreds of bodies.

Unfortunately, the best view of the nest, and rooftop they play on, that I have access to is from home, through a spotting scope, from about three-quarters of a mile away (!). Good thing they’re such big birds.