[CT Birds] Raven story

[htg1523 at att.net]

My wife and I were going to Griswold Pt area yesterday, when the temperature was in the 60's and the sun was bright, to look for late Orange Sulphur butterflies.  As we drove down Lyme St in Old Lyme,heading into the sun. a large bird flew out in front of us going down the road.  I was thinking,, maybe Gr Horned owl  because of the size.
  Almost immediately it landed on  a cross arm at the top of a utility pole.  I pulled over and we could see it was a Raven.  The configureation (?)  of the pole was a steel pin with insulator on both ends of the cross arm and the middle wire was carried on a steel "pole pin" attached to the top of the pole.  Raven hoped to the top of the pole  and was moving it's bill around the insulator bottom where it is screwed onto the pin.  It did this a few times then flew back up the road in the direction it had come from,,landing on the next utility pole in line.  We did not know that is where it had flew from originally.  On the pole top was some food that the Raven began to eat.  I did not have my scope with me and with binocs I could not see what it was but it was reddish in color,,like meat.  Raven took a couple of bites and then flew to a nearby white pine tree adjacent to the pole with the food.  Raven stayed there a minute or so, then flew across the street to a large buttonball tree (sycamore) and then to a red cedar.  We could not see the bird well at this point and left for Gris.  After spending an hour looking for the butterflies( we saw two) we headed home by way of Lyme St.  Raven was no where to seen and the food was gone.  My guess is that the bird was caching food but in a strange place I thought.
    It made me think back to the early 1990s when I was in Alaska as a USFWS volunteer.  My son Greg was doing a study on the effects of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (1989)on Black-Legged Kittiwakes  in Prince William Sound and I was part of his crew.  There is a colony of 10,000 Blacked-Legged Kittiwakes about ten miles out of Valdez near the Shoup Glacier where our camp was.  Ravens do  number on the eggs of these nesting gulls and I remember one morning we watched a couple Ravens make over 35 trips to the colony, about a quarter mile away, and coming back with eggs which they would cache in the soil under alder bushes.   Amazing birds!!

I got a little carried away here. 
Hank Golet