Background: me and Andrew made it to Cypress Mountain. the plan was cross-country skiing, but it was raining there and no discount for skiing in the rain. So I went for a walk around, hoping to see some birds (specifically, I was trying to get the Gray Jay who haven’t made it to my year list since I started birding). I took the free trail around the skiing area up till the first slope down, nothing. On the way back, almost at the trail head, a flock of 8 or 9 Chestnut-backed Chickadees and a single call by a Red-breasted Nuthatch. and a Raven.
Back on the road, as our attention was arrested by a Raven who kept shoving his beak into the snow, a second Raven came and start rolling over in the snow: tilting to one side, then laying on his back with feet in the air, and coming back up through the other side… The bird repeated this maneuver about a dozen times (admittedly, I cheered every time), before both Ravens flew elsewhere.
I can’t tell whether the Raven was taking a snow bath or playing – M. Brazil in his article Common Raven Corvus corax at play; records from Japan (Ornithol. Sci. 1: 150–152, 2002) reckons it’s the latter.
Smart Raven – the people on the other side of the hill were paying exuberant prices for snow tubing – but no prices were posted for just rolling over in the snow.
Geoff
haha cool!! Raven at Play.