Looks and habits are partly to blame for the bird’s reputation. Is it any wonder the collective term for a group of these birds is “an unkindness of ravens”?Īn “Unkindness” of Ravens, Feeding with Wolf. In fact, the executioner’s block was commonly called the “raven-stone.” The playwright Christopher Marlowe calls the raven “sad-presaging,” heralding death. In anonymous Scots balladry two ravens discuss, with obvious enjoyment, a gruesome feast of human flesh (“Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane / And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een …”). In Mother Goose rhymes the bird is a mischievous villain (“A raven cried croak! and they all tumbled down, / Bumpety, bumpety, bump!”). Literature, historically, has not been kind to the raven. Not a comforter, not a companion, but a “fiend,” as the poet Poe calls it, a harbinger of doom, a messenger from “night’s Plutonian shore.” For Poe, as for many others before him, the apparition of this dark bird, with its shaggy throat and massive head, would be laughable if not for the abysmal foreboding it seems to inspire. Hold on a second-the raven? “Once upon a midnight dreary” and all that? That raven?

Smart, sociable, funny, somebody you can look up to? And not just a talker, either, but a problem-solver, a doer, a daredevil, the sort who’s got the gumption to put himself out on a limb and the brains to get down again. Somebody who won’t mince words when you need a tongue-lashing. You know, somebody to straighten you out, get you back on track. So I hear you’re looking for a life coach.

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Songbird of doom