I reach Vindrasen on foot, up the switchbacks behind Jarnsund, in the last week of October, and the slope reports on its tenants before I see one. Black feathers lie pressed into the mud in drifts, thickest on the inside of each turn. Every rowan is stripped of berries to the height of a man's reach and then, oddly, higher. The sheepfold roof at the third bend wears a gray crust of droppings. At the top of the pass a field of barley stubble is moving, though there is no wind. That is the swarm: some two hundred ravens that behave as one animal, with one direction and one appetite.
In November rain it spreads. The birds fan across the stubble in a flat sheet, walking, heads down, and the sheet drifts uphill or down at the pace of a slow cow. They eat leatherjackets, rowan berries and whatever the weather has killed. Each evening they leave pellets of juniper seed packed with sheep's teeth, and the shepherds read these to learn where it has fed. About a dozen birds carry a white streak across the left wing. In flight these line up into a pale curve through the black, like a seam stitched across a coat, and it holds its shape when the sheet turns. When I walk too close, every eye comes up at once, a dull copper, and stays on me.
With the first hard frost it draws in. The sheet becomes a column taller than the church roof at Jarnsund, turning in one motion with a sound like a sail being shaken out. The dogs on the ridge farms go quiet and lie flat. Nobody on the pass whistles, because a whistle pulls the column into a point and aims it. Shutters are closed at dusk. Ragna Haukedal, who keeps sheep above the last switchback, sets a pan of fish heads on her woodpile every frost night and calls it rent. The swarm numbers the same in every season, whatever the hawks take. I have no way to check this.
By January the snow lies too deep for easy flying, and the swarm walks. It crosses the drifts on foot with wings folded, a black mass the width of a threshing floor, leaving a trench behind it as if a broom had been dragged through. It opens frozen carcasses on the north slope by turns, the front birds working until the ones behind crowd them aside. On the one clear day I watch it lift off the stubble all at once, the pale seam curling over the top, and head toward the fjord. A boy at the last gate watches it go. "Don't whistle," he says. "It's listening."
- Classification
- Collective bird-beast with one mind
- Habitat
- Mountain passes and barley stubble
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 200 birds, column 40 ft tall
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Northern fjord highlands
- Binomial
- Corvus unanimus
- Diet
- Carrion, rowan berries, leatherjackets
- Temperament
- Watchful, patient, territorial