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4.02 AVERAGE
4.02 AVERAGE
funny
informative
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
Great for bird lovers and people who love memoirs with birds.
Christopher is a great story teller and I learned a-lot about ravens. I liked how he talked about ending his military service and all of the thoughts that comes to ended 2 decades of a way of life. I also enjoyed learning about the yeo man warders and the lore of the tower of London and the tower ravens. That being said sometimes I felt that there were too many details and it caused pacing issues for me.
Christopher is a great story teller and I learned a-lot about ravens. I liked how he talked about ending his military service and all of the thoughts that comes to ended 2 decades of a way of life. I also enjoyed learning about the yeo man warders and the lore of the tower of London and the tower ravens. That being said sometimes I felt that there were too many details and it caused pacing issues for me.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Animal death
adventurous
dark
funny
informative
lighthearted
fast-paced
I was sad when I read that Merlina had gone missing and now presumed dead while reading the book.
Skaife writes with humour, and you can see from the book that he's a 'character,' as people say.
You can also see his love for the Ravens and even other wildlife around the tower.
He even states that he tries to look after all the wildlife's needs, not just the Ravens.
On pages 164- 165, he ponders Raven's emotions and says he thinks they can remember things, such as remembering a former Ravenmaster. Studies have been done on Crows that certainly point to them having a memory and remembering peoples faces. And since Crows are also Corvids, I can see this being the case too for Ravens.
Crows & Jackdaws have been known to 'mob' people they deem bad, whatever bad means to a Crow. And that crow that dive-bombed you because you did something it deemed bad will dive bomb you again on another day if you arrive because it remembers your face!
And I believe it was Jackdaws in Konrad Lorenz's book 'King Solomon's ring' that he mentioned dive-bombed you if you held anything that remotely looks like it could be a black feather. And because they can remember faces, he dressed up as the devil while trying to ring them. Not on the phone, I mean banding their legs.
I can attest to birds in general seeming to like routine. This also reminds me of myself, since I like a routine to make me comfortable in an ever-changing world. The world may change around me, but I feel most stable if I have some routine to ground me.
Skaife seems to have some moral hangups about one particular thing that isn't really that big of an issue, in that there is no need to view it through the lens of morality. On pages 156- 157, he talks about Ravens mimicking the human language and says, 'It certainly is amusing, but that doesn't make it right.' That right there I can only call, utter bollocks. It wouldn't really make them any less wild, after all, all they're doing is mimicking a sound. Plus, mimicking sound is what birds do, even in the wild, so why he has such a hang up about that, is beyond me.
If it's with the logic in mind that they're wild animals and we should treat them as such, then he is living a major contradiction. Because if that is his logic, (even though it's not logical), then why not go the whole hog and say, we shouldn't be keeping a wild animal in the tower in the first place? Note that, that isn't my opinion, I'm just stating that if you're gonna have such bizarre moral qualms about something as slight as 'allowing' a bird to learn and mimic human language, then maybe you should rethink the entire situation you have them in, in the first place. Of course, it's much too late to go and set these Ravens free if that was his conclusion.
But he goes to say further in the book he wants to start a breeding programme. So he wants to continue the tradition.
Fair enough.
But I still find his moralising of birds learning human words to be illogical and bizarre.
As for the myth that the Ravens need to be there or the tower will fall, I guess I can relate to that feeling.
I have frequent visitors to the garden, which I feed peanuts to regularly, the Eurasian Jay. Which are part of the Corvid family and I have become attached to these birds, one of them in particular that comes most days. And I do feel like the day they inevitably stop coming; I may well collapse. Because I love those buggers! So, it's nice to know that a fortress in London is supposedly as weak and as much of a pussy as I am!
He talks about about the history of the tower, but I'm more interested in the Ravens.
I wish I could rate 3 and a half stars, but Goodreads doesn't allow that.
Skaife writes with humour, and you can see from the book that he's a 'character,' as people say.
You can also see his love for the Ravens and even other wildlife around the tower.
He even states that he tries to look after all the wildlife's needs, not just the Ravens.
On pages 164- 165, he ponders Raven's emotions and says he thinks they can remember things, such as remembering a former Ravenmaster. Studies have been done on Crows that certainly point to them having a memory and remembering peoples faces. And since Crows are also Corvids, I can see this being the case too for Ravens.
Crows & Jackdaws have been known to 'mob' people they deem bad, whatever bad means to a Crow. And that crow that dive-bombed you because you did something it deemed bad will dive bomb you again on another day if you arrive because it remembers your face!
And I believe it was Jackdaws in Konrad Lorenz's book 'King Solomon's ring' that he mentioned dive-bombed you if you held anything that remotely looks like it could be a black feather. And because they can remember faces, he dressed up as the devil while trying to ring them. Not on the phone, I mean banding their legs.
I can attest to birds in general seeming to like routine. This also reminds me of myself, since I like a routine to make me comfortable in an ever-changing world. The world may change around me, but I feel most stable if I have some routine to ground me.
Skaife seems to have some moral hangups about one particular thing that isn't really that big of an issue, in that there is no need to view it through the lens of morality. On pages 156- 157, he talks about Ravens mimicking the human language and says, 'It certainly is amusing, but that doesn't make it right.' That right there I can only call, utter bollocks. It wouldn't really make them any less wild, after all, all they're doing is mimicking a sound. Plus, mimicking sound is what birds do, even in the wild, so why he has such a hang up about that, is beyond me.
If it's with the logic in mind that they're wild animals and we should treat them as such, then he is living a major contradiction. Because if that is his logic, (even though it's not logical), then why not go the whole hog and say, we shouldn't be keeping a wild animal in the tower in the first place? Note that, that isn't my opinion, I'm just stating that if you're gonna have such bizarre moral qualms about something as slight as 'allowing' a bird to learn and mimic human language, then maybe you should rethink the entire situation you have them in, in the first place. Of course, it's much too late to go and set these Ravens free if that was his conclusion.
But he goes to say further in the book he wants to start a breeding programme. So he wants to continue the tradition.
Fair enough.
But I still find his moralising of birds learning human words to be illogical and bizarre.
As for the myth that the Ravens need to be there or the tower will fall, I guess I can relate to that feeling.
I have frequent visitors to the garden, which I feed peanuts to regularly, the Eurasian Jay. Which are part of the Corvid family and I have become attached to these birds, one of them in particular that comes most days. And I do feel like the day they inevitably stop coming; I may well collapse. Because I love those buggers! So, it's nice to know that a fortress in London is supposedly as weak and as much of a pussy as I am!
He talks about about the history of the tower, but I'm more interested in the Ravens.
I wish I could rate 3 and a half stars, but Goodreads doesn't allow that.
informative
slow-paced
No meio de Londres tem um castelo de 1000 anos. Dentro do castelo tem 7 corvos, e um cara que cuida dos corvos. Esse é o livro com a história dele. E é uma delícia.
informative
reflective
fast-paced
In "Books That Should Have Been a Series of Blog Posts: Part I".
What a disappointment. Skaife needed a stricter editor because his Moth story covered like 90% of the highlights of this book. Everything else was Wikipedia 101 basics about ravens as a species, or else the awkward transitions that work well enough in speech but not in writing (e.g. "and now, let me tell you about this..." as a segue into the next chapter). Oddly he left out most of the history of the Tower of London, or the experience of living in such an ancient history-filled building, instead choosing to repeat himself about daily routine stuff.
Skip the book and go listen to the podcast version of his story: The Moth: Birds of a Feather.
What a disappointment. Skaife needed a stricter editor because his Moth story covered like 90% of the highlights of this book. Everything else was Wikipedia 101 basics about ravens as a species, or else the awkward transitions that work well enough in speech but not in writing (e.g. "and now, let me tell you about this..." as a segue into the next chapter). Oddly he left out most of the history of the Tower of London, or the experience of living in such an ancient history-filled building, instead choosing to repeat himself about daily routine stuff.
Skip the book and go listen to the podcast version of his story: The Moth: Birds of a Feather.
I was completely charmed by this book. Coming off of two decades of military service, Skaife applies and eventually gets a position as a Yeomen Warder at the historical Tower of London. He now has the additional title of Ravenmaster as he is responsible for the six ravens that reside at the Tower. It's a job that was voted strangest in England, but the way Skaife describes it shows it to be a strictly regimented yet hands-off position that allows the birds to be as wild as possible. But his careful husbandry keeps the birds safe from urban foxes, from the massive crowds of tourists who visit the tower each year, and also from each other.
Skaife is a lover of stories and history which is what attracted him to his position in the first place. He not only cares for the ravens but gives tours to the public, detailing the long and often grizzly history of the Tower. In this book you get a front row seat to this history as well as Skaife's own background. Then, of course, there are the birds: fiercely intelligent creatures called by one scientist, "apes with wings" because of their huge brains. The author may not be an ornithologist, but he's well-read on the subject while having more one-on-one experience with the birds than any of us would have at our day jobs.
His love for the birds and his job rings (or should I say squawks and clicks?) through this book. Let this storyteller talk to you about his birds for 250 pages. You certainly won't regret it.
Skaife is a lover of stories and history which is what attracted him to his position in the first place. He not only cares for the ravens but gives tours to the public, detailing the long and often grizzly history of the Tower. In this book you get a front row seat to this history as well as Skaife's own background. Then, of course, there are the birds: fiercely intelligent creatures called by one scientist, "apes with wings" because of their huge brains. The author may not be an ornithologist, but he's well-read on the subject while having more one-on-one experience with the birds than any of us would have at our day jobs.
His love for the birds and his job rings (or should I say squawks and clicks?) through this book. Let this storyteller talk to you about his birds for 250 pages. You certainly won't regret it.
informative
lighthearted
slow-paced
This book had really good elements, but could have used a stronger editor to help with arranging it into a more unified whole — it lost marks for repeating itself frequently, and for failing to elaborate on elements that were addressed in passing but could have added to the story. Also for presenting potentially interesting elements (how to say raven in multiple languages) as a long list in paragraph form — some etymologies would have appealed to me — or even breaking the list into obviously related groups and sprinkling them throughout the text instead of as one overwhelming block that I struggled not to skip over. The author’s history of military service wasn’t integrated as well as it could have been and felt a bit like a section from a separate book. I wish he’d conducted some more research or consulted some experts instead of just stating repeatedly that he isn’t one. It was a good effort from someone who is not a practiced writer but still had an interesting story to tell — I mostly feel that his publisher let him down by putting the product out unpolished.
When I picked this up, I actually thought this was a fictionalized account of some fictional Ravenmaster not a non-fiction account of raising and handling Ravens. For whatever reason I picked this up on a whim, clearly not having any idea what to expect when I started reading it. This was a quick and easy read. Very enjoyable. Christopher Skaife’s writing is fascinating. He does well telling stories about the ravens, their history and the folklore surrounding them. If you are looking for something different - grab this!