Richmonders don’t normally encounter ravens outside of an Edgar Allan Poe reading.
Ravens, which resemble crows but are as big as red-tailed hawks, usually live in the mountains, where they nest on cliffs.
But a raven that couldn’t fly turned up this spring in a Henrico County parking lot, where its mate brought it hamburger bits and other junk food.
Today, the raven is recovering in a Waynesboro animal hospital, where it recently got feather transplants.
The trail to the hospital was a long one.
Maureen Bergin, an IT specialist at Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield at 2015 Staples Mill Road, first started seeing the bird and her mate in spring 2013.
The two ravens were nesting in an open shed next door at the Noland Co. plumbing supply business.
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This past March, Bergin noticed the female raven hopping about the Anthem parking lot. It had lost some feathers, and it couldn’t fly.
For more than two months, Bergin tried to get someone to help the raven. People kept telling her it was a crow, and they weren’t interested in helping, Bergin said.
Bergin took to setting out hard-boiled eggs and other healthy foods in an effort to lure the raven into a dog crate so she could get it to a vet. “I love animals,” she said.
Bergin tried singing and talking to the raven to get it into the crate.
“You sing to it and it would make these clucking sounds back at you,” Bergin said. “It was really cool. As long as I didn’t make eye contact, she would talk to me.”
But, Bergin said, “It wouldn’t get near the cage. It was a smart bird.”
On June 5, someone passed one of Bergin’s help-me emails, with pictures of the bird, to Hanover County bird rehabber Barbara Slatcher.
Slatcher immediately recognized it as a raven — “they are super rare in Richmond” — and contacted Sergio Harding, a biologist with the state Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.
The next day, Harding and three co-workers arrived at Anthem with a long-handled net. They began chasing the flightless raven and found it still had some life left in it.
“I had to sprint to keep up with it,” Harding said. “It was just hopping around, but really quickly. Galloping.”
Harding netted the bird, and it went to the Wildlife Center of Virginia, a wild-animal hospital in Waynesboro.
Veterinarians there treated the bird for mites, which apparently had caused it to lose feathers.
Over the summer, some small feathers grew back. But some wing feathers had broken off, leaving part of each broken feather’s shaft in the bird. Those feathers wouldn’t be replaced until the bird molted in spring.
So, after getting feathers from wildlife rehabbers in Maine and Minnesota, a team at the Waynesboro hospital last month attached six feathers to the raven’s right wing and one to its left.
The process is called “imping.” For each feather, it involves whittling a tiny piece of bamboo, then trimming the tip of the donated feather’s shaft and trimming the top of the shaft that remains in the bird, so the two ends match up. One end of the bamboo goes into the donor shaft, and the other end goes into the shaft that’s in the bird. An adhesive holds the connection together.
Two of the new feathers eventually fell out, but the raven can fly without them, said Amanda Nicholson, the wildlife center’s outreach director. The raven is living in a large flight pen and is gaining strength.
Ravens are intelligent, impressive birds, with big beaks and wingspans that can top 4 feet. They can mimic many sounds, including the human voice. They are related to crows and blue jays.
Ravens appear frequently in folklore and literature. In Genesis, a raven was the first animal released from Noah’s ark. Poe’s “The Raven” is one of the world’s best-known poems.
Harding, the biologist, said he was aware of just one other raven nest in the metro area in recent memory, in a Chester apartment complex about four years ago.
It’s not clear where the Henrico ravens came from, but Harding said they possibly could be the offspring of other central Virginia ravens we don’t know about.
The Henrico raven could be returned to the wild in November or December.
But it had a bad habit of chewing the rubber around car doors. So, do you return the bird here, and to its mate, and run the risk of that happening again? Or do you release it somewhere else?
It’ll be tough to find an answer that gets rave reviews from everyone.
