Ravens Rap on a Window of Opportunity

For those who bring a ghoulish curiosity to their scrutiny of Southern California’s environmental decay, I offer the case of the raven. The evolution of the raven to Frankenstein status may not be a major milepost of our decline, but it’s a sign of something. You might put the raven in the same league with the solemya clam.

Connoisseurs of this sort of thing will recall that the solemya clam was discovered thriving in the sewage sludge at the bottom of Santa Monica Bay. Long after other marine life had been extinguished by the soup of heavy metals and petrochemicals deposited there by the city, the clam could be seen sliding through the muck, contentedly gulping gaseous sulfur bubbling up from the goo. The solemya clam had a talent for adapting.

And so too does the raven. In fact, both creatures are interesting because they have turned environmental filth to their own, personal advantage. But whereas the clam was content with its lot down there in the sludge, the raven has proven more ambitious. First it took over the Mojave. And now the raven may be headed for the city.

As recently as the 1940s, ravens were rarely encountered in the Mojave or elsewhere in Southern California. A larger cousin to the crow, ravens are part scavenger and part predator, and most likely they found the pickings slim in the untrammeled desert.

The desert, of course, was not destined to stay untrammeled for very long. Even in the 1940s, a pattern of degradation had become apparent. The Mojave was losing its large, grassy regions and becoming a drier, harsher place. As the savanna areas disappeared, they were replaced by the sage and thistle-covered sand we see today.

It’s possible this decay was caused by over-grazing, though no one is certain. In any case, that change was just the beginning. New roads began to crisscross the desert and towns sprang up. Each town developed what is delicately called a disposal problem, and soon there was a corresponding landfill site and sewage pond.

Now, this would hardly qualify the Mojave for Bhopal status. But in the desert, small shifts in the environment tend to get magnified, and that’s what happened in the Mojave. A window of opportunity had been created for the raven.

Each new road turned into a prolific producer of flat rodents, snakes and birds. The ravens began to patrol the roads in sorties, looking for the dead and dying. If they tired of road kills, they could fly to the nearest dump for some soggy Cheez-its. And there were always the sewage ponds. Whole flocks gathered on the spray arms, waiting for tasty bits of effluent to shoot out. The Mojave, once an austere place for the raven, had been turned into a food factory.

Eugene Cardiff, an ornithologist with San Bernardino County, watched the transformation take place. He says it’s hard to imagine a creature better suited to exploit the opportunity. The raven is big, strong and, perhaps most important, intelligent. Certain individuals have been described in scientific journals as being capable of crude tool use. Not your ordinary bird.

And exploit is just what the raven did. In the last 20 years, its population has grown 1,528% in the Mojave, and the raven has now taken over large chunks of the desert. This spring the Bureau of Land Management proposed shooting ravens because they were eating the desert tortoise into extinction. In some desert valleys, Cardiff says, few finches or wrens or small rodents or even lizards are left because the ravens have got them all.

Cardiff, who talks about the raven with a mixture of awe and horror, believes their population probably has leveled off in the desert. There are only so many nest sites out there, and most are being used, he says. For the raven population to grow further, it must expand its territory.

This possibility intrigues Cardiff. He believes a logical next step for the raven would be Los Angeles. After all, he says, the city offers garbage and sewage in huge abundance, not to mention many flat cats and flat dogs. The only thing standing in the way of a raven takeover is the crow, the raven’s smaller relative now doing very well in the city.

So far there’s no convincing evidence of a big move on L.A. by the ravens. But sightings in the city have increased. There’s a few along the river, and one pair on the UCLA campus. The UCLA ravens skulk around the campus trees, staring balefully at the crows. These birds might be nothing more than raven adventurists, of course, or undesirables kicked out of the main population. And then again, they just might be scouts.