Ravens Mothers Day

On January 1st, 2015, I saw Common Ravens for the first time in Brooklyn. A pair were cavorting on the block of 39th Street between the water (“0 Avenue”?) and 1st Avenue. An abandoned building, which is still abandoned, was the stage of their canoodling. Yesterday, I saw the above bird over the same block.

75 minutes earlier, and from 6th Avenue, we counted six Ravens on the old warehouse building that contains their nest. (The most I could get in any one photo was the above four.) It took me the longest time to discover the location of the nest, so I’m not sure it’s been the same site since 2015. I do know that almost every visit to nearby Bush Terminal Park resulted in a Raven sighting… or two. (Not to mention a hearing.)

Here are images of two of the birds, this time from 2nd Avenue and 35th, also yesterday.

Perversely, it’s easier to see this location from much farther away. It’s at the end of a vast fenced complex called the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, which hasn’t been much of a terminal for years. Over the years, numerous plans have been in the air for the facility. In the last week, workers appeared to set stuff up on the roof of the warehouse. It finally looks like something is striking:

A staging area for an off-shore windmill farm. Not a factory, as far as I can tell, put just a vast parking lot for components. In the rendering, the Raven warehouse is gone, replaced by a stack of pylons or whatever.

The Ravens seem to have fledged just in time!

Here’s a Raven’s-eye-view of the warehouse, snagged off the internet from the windmill company’s YouTube. I presume this will be the last year the Ravens nest here. They seem smart enough to find some other place: other pairs of NYC Ravens that I know about nest on the Brooklyn Bridge and on the Church of on St John the Divine.