#RAVEN STUCK IN QUICKSAND HOW TO#

When done with training exercises, I’d move the aviary back to in view of the wild ravens lessons. I was placing mealworms on my outdoor table (so no more than a metre drop from the aviary’s top perch). They start their babies off with horizontal flights from a tree to a rooftop. I set it up similar to how the wild ravens do. Fishing nets formed walls, turning it into a temporary flight. The aviary it was in, is on wheels and so easy enough to move into my outdoor patio. Well the answer to this was to start some flight training. The chick agreed to go down one more perch but no further.

#RAVEN STUCK IN QUICKSAND HOW TO#

I didn’t want to handle the bird much (better if it has a healthy fear of humans) but occasionally put it down the bottom of the aviary to forage and work its way up its “tree” in the vague hope that if it learned how to go up confidently, following the reverse path might become less frightening. I carefully arranged the branches to be similar to a tree, but easy enough to jump from one to another. It was as though it reached some sort of fear threshold and would just freeze. It was quite happy (if a little clumsy) in its attempts to get to the highest perch but once there, it refused to jump down more than one or two branches. The main challenge turned out to be getting the chick to descend to forage. The adult male raven has approached the baby several times and seems to have stepped up the food hunt – hunting bugs here. It struck me that it needed the raven lessons that I knew were going on at my home. It was basically a few weeks behind where it should be in life skills with a few bad habits thrown in for fun. It had learned the terrible lesson that humans equal minced meat, making it way too tame for a wild bird. It also didn’t seem to know where to find food (or want to) and how to avoid cats. It had basic instincts allowing it to take off and glide but there was no control there. It didn’t know how to ascend/descend or land. No, its main problem seemed to be lack of knowledge. Possibly thrown from a nest in that last windstorm? Maybe it had been blown too far away for the parents to find it? Then it seems to have been attacked by a cat? But its injuries were surprisingly minor and weren’t the cause of it not thriving. This baby raven was orphaned and injured. It struck me that I might have found a different sort of mitigating circumstance. On a corrected diet, the raven’s droppings quickly normalized.

Raven stuck in quicksand