White Ravens.

1. Gellner
   July 18th, 2007 at 12:53 pm

   what is mince?

2. gail
   July 18th, 2007 at 1:01 pm

   I don't know. Mincemeat? Any native British speakers out there who can translate?

3. A.Non.E.Mous
   July 18th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

   Mince would be ground beef. The term "mincemeat" would generally be used to refer to a sweet pie filling mixture containing dried fruit such as raisins.

4. A.Non.E.Mous
   July 18th, 2007 at 1:09 pm

   ...which are confusingly known as "mince pies."

5. gail
   July 18th, 2007 at 1:13 pm

   Thanks Anon. I was wondering why they were giving birds Christmas pie filling...

6. MoniA
   July 18th, 2007 at 8:12 pm

   Canned dogfood would work as well. When I was a child my family raised a pair of baby ravens in our chicken coop and fed them canned dogfood. They loved it. Their nest had been in a tree that got cut down so we thought their mother might abandon them. She eventually did find them even though we lived a good drive from where there nest had been. Once they were grown we thre them up in the air and they learned to fly. Over the next few years they would pay us a visit but they never got close enough to touch again. I'm sending my parents this article. They'll probably enjoy it.

7. gail
   July 18th, 2007 at 9:20 pm

   How nice, MoniA! I've heard that ravens are very intelligent and easy to tame, and that they also learn to talk very well.

8. MoniA
   July 19th, 2007 at 5:45 am

   We heard that too but ours never talked. They did seem intelligent though. I remember them as being huge and definitely smarter than chickens. Someone told us you had to cut a little slit in their tongue in order for them to have talking ability. Of course we never tried that. I have a few pictures of them.

9. Jonn
   July 19th, 2007 at 12:42 pm

   They're smart, but not very tamable. They're also illegal to own in the US and in (at least) Germany because they're wild animals. You need to get some other more exotic (I think African) variety in order to legally keep them. They also seem to be fairly ill-tempered.

   Though I have not had ravens, I am extremely skeptical about their verbal prowess, unless you consider squaking verbose.

10. gail
    July 19th, 2007 at 4:46 pm

    Check out Terry the talking raven!

11. Larfin Jackarse
    July 20th, 2007 at 3:27 am

    Meanwhile in Oz:

    -my aunt has a kookaburra (wild) that flies in every morning to get a feed of meat. If she is not in the kitchen it will bang on the window with its beak calling for attention. If that doesn't work it will fly round the house to work out where she is and bang on that window. It will then fly back to to the kitchen window and wait to be fed. The interesting thing is that it will tolerate being patted and scratched until it has food, although it seems uncomfortable with it.

    If steak is available, as opposed to Devon (sort of like Spam) it will tolerate it even more and come back for more.

    We figure it has the whole neighbourhood trained to feed it rump steak.

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