Growing fast

The three raven chicks are growing fast - already feathered on parts of their bodies. We believe that the eldest of the three is about four weeks old. Still, the parents favour proteine for their young; heart, liver, minced meet, shrimps, fish and eggs is part of their diet. With added vitamins anc calcium. And it seems to do the trick!

http://youtu.be/2Eo_L9QUXCI

Visiting students

Today we were visited by students from the course in Ecology of behaviour/ethology at Lund University. Mathias usually gives some lectures on this course, and the students come for a field trip to the raven facility.

Without the extra human friendly Siden and Juno, the raven group was a bit more scared of new people, and the students stayed inside the cabin until the birds had calmed down.

The assignment for the students was to decide the dominance hierarchy of the group, which is not necessarily an easy task. For exapmle, the lowest ranked bird of the whole group is None - but as she is friendly with people and not afraid of them, she was merrily hopping around, vocalizing and displaying. And as the others are more afraid of visitors, no one tells her off, and it's easy to get the impression that she is a dominant bird.
To not disturb the breeding pair, we had sealed off their part of the aviary from the visitors, and it turned out fine. No alarm calls or attacks - they just continued with their time consuming task....feeding their young who seem to grow by the minute!

Anders Brodin, Professor Evolutionary Ecology (course coordinator) & Mathias

Number of nestlings

For a long time, we have been quite unsure of the number of nestlings. And now, all of a sudden we can easily see all of them when they are being fed. Three hungry beeks stretching upwards...

//Helena

Building and painting

Since the breeding season started, we have not been able to work that much with the ravens. Firstly, there is much more group dynamics than usual, which make it harder to interest the them in experimenting. Secondly it's much more difficult to separate them, since Juno and Siden has occupied one whole section of the aviary complex.

The door to the old pig stable

Instead, we have put some time and effort into enhancing the facility, and a grant from The Royal Physiographical Society has made it possible  to convert a part of an old pig stable into much needed research facilities!









 

The renovated part will house one area for preparing and keeping raven food, analyzing fecal samples and keeping research equipment.

 We are also constructing a small indoor aviary in case any bird should be injured, or for any reason should need to be kept apart from the others. This aviary could also be used for experiments where sensitive equipment, like an eye-tracker, is used.

On the second floor (although we don't yet have any stairs) a part of the old hayloft has been converted into a spacious area, suitable for seminars and meetings.
The only downside is that it probably will take ages to paint...

Radio documentary on corvid research

Today we are visited by Lotta Malmstedt from the Swedish National Radio, P1 Documentary. She is making a documentary about our research, which probably will be broadcasted early winter.

Feeding nestlings

Raven chicks

We have been waiting for Juno to realize that her eggs will not hatch, and that life in the aviaries should go back to normal again. For ravens it can take several years before they find a partner and manage to breed successfully. It is quite common that young raven couples have to practise nest building a few times before the nest meets the required standard, and also that the female has to learn how to incubate properly. As far as we know, and we did ask around in the raven research community, succeeding in raising chicks in the first adult year is unheard of.

So imagine our shock, when we heard faint tweets from the nest last week. The eggs had hatched after all! To make it even more incredible, Siden and Juno are siblings (if we didn’t mix them up when they were small) and we have never seen them mating. It is quite common that ravens form sibling pairs during the early years, or even pairs of the same sex, so that has never been an issue. Moreover, sibling mating in birds is not totally uncommon, and if they are able to buffer out the sometimes negative effects of combining closely related genomes, the strategy can even be rather successful from a biological perspective.  On the other hand -  if the gene mix should be bad– the eggs normally wouldn’t hatch. So either, Juno and Siden are not siblings, or Juno and Rickard has been mating – or the gene combination of the chicks are perfectly healthy. We will still have to see what happens next.

As soon as we realized that the eggs had hatched, we ran to the store to buy the best chick food, extra vitamins and calcium – to provide the young parents with as nutritious food for their chicks as possible. And they are so capable! When new food is brought, Siden immediately caches most of the food, and then flies off to the nest to feed Juno and the chicks. Still, we don’t know if they will manage to properly care for them, but at least they will have a good chance.

//Helena