On May 26th, 1997 a strange event occurred in my life. Our family was enhanced by one, a raven. You may call it a blackbird, magpie, or whatever you prefer, but to me she is a Raven. The story goes like this...

It was Memorial Day Weekend, May 26th. I had the weekend off and I was playing around with our old RV. It sits in our driveway, and every so often it needs attention; running the motor and generator, that sort of thing. We live in an older neighborhood with overhead wires. We have blackbirds by the hundreds. Never gave them much thought or attention except when they woke me. But today was to be different.

As I worked on the RV, I noticed one blackbird walking around on the driveway. I didn't give it much thought. They are gutsy and rarely afraid of people. But this one didn't fly away as I walked near. In fact it just ran away from me to the side gate. Again I didn't think too much of it at the time. I saw it go under the gate and run into the back yard. That was the end of it, or so I thought.

About an hour later, I had finished my project and I was resting in the house. Suddenly I heard the loud "CAW" of at least a hundred blackbirds, coming from the back yard. Even for them this was unusual. They are loud, but they never do this unless something is amiss. So I investigated.

The first thing I saw was at least two hundred ravens, all on the power lines above the house, all screaming to high heaven. The sound was deafening. They all seemed to be looking down into my back yard. I saw one of our cats, Misty staring into our empty swimming pool. She was obviously on the hunt.

I looked into the empty pool, and that's when I saw Raven. She was obviously the same bird I had seen behind my RV earlier. She was standing in the middle of the pool completely paralyzed. I walked into the pool and could see the bird was traumatized, probably from the cat, and was completely in a hypnotic state. It appeared to me it was near death, and as soon as I touched her, she collapsed in my hands, totally unconscious. Not being a bird fancier, I wasn't sure what to do. Hell, it was just a blackbird. Yet I couldn't just leave it to be mauled by my cats either.

Nothing should die alone. I've experienced death in my life, and I see it in my work. If I've learned anything, it is that no one, or no thing, should die alone. So I brought the bird, into the house to die. I had no faith it would survive, but what else could I do? My wife found a box, and we put the bird in it. I spent the next hours simply petting it. I didn't know what else to do. My wife found an eye dropper and tried to give it water. There was no change and we had little hope. My wife slept on the couch next to the box, and I went to bed fully believing I would have to bury the dead bird in the morning.

But that was not the case. Our Raven started kicking around in the box overnight. When I got up, the first thing I found was a blackbird standing up. I'm sure you all remember those cartoons where the bird's eyes are simply an "X" indicating they are unconscious. Well that's what I left the night before. In the morning Raven's eyes had even regained their color. She was on the mend!

I realized she was a baby, and figured as soon as she recovered, we would have to let her go free so she could survive. However after several tries, it became obvious that wasn't going to work out. For weeks she couldn't fly and gain altitude. Then when the big day did arrive, I let her go and she flew into a neighbors tree. Within minutes she fell out of it, into the waiting paws of our neighbor's dog. I destroyed our fence getting to her, and again pulled her from a life threatening situation. That was the day I decided I would never let her go again.

She continued to recover, and today, four months later Raven (named after a friend) is a major part of our life. She is not in a cage, she is on top of it. The cage is located in our dining room next to a sliding glass door so she can look outside. She has run of the house, but doesn't take advantage. She stays on the cage unless she wants to be with my wife and then she will fly across the house to her. She is messy at her home base, but seems to know that we don't want that mess all over the rest of the house.

On occasion, she sits on my shoulder as I play with the computer, but overall she has her own territory and seems happy. Just today she has accepted me and I now get a greeting of "wide wings" when I get up in the morning, along with a soft "caw" of hello. I'm hooked.

This is the story of my Raven. Why she came into my life seems to be coincidental with how things are going for me, which is another story. Obviously it was meant to be since until now I had no use for these blackbirds. But I'm glad she is here and she makes me laugh every day.