There have been a couple of ravens hanging around the last few weeks, and I wondered if they had decided to nest in the area. I went to spend time watching them today to see what they were up to. When I arrived in the area where they were, my suspicions were confirmed. I immediately heard the snap of a limb, and a raven flew out of a tree with a medium-sized twig. They were regularly making trips into nearby trees and breaking off branches. I watched them for an hour and a half, and I never saw them search for nesting material on the ground. The nest is next to the trunk about two-thirds up in an old evergreen tree. It was amusing to see them fly back to the nesting site. As they approached the site, they would sort of crash land in to the branches. You could hear their wings hitting the limbs as they flew into the tree. Also, they were very vocal as they flew in and out building the nest, almost as if they were fussing about how to construct it. I wasn't able to get a good photograph during that time, because there were only brief windows of opportunities as they flew through the canopy and they stayed fairly obscured from view as they looked for sticks. It will be interesting to see how ravens nesting in the area will affect the nesting of other birds nearby.
