Remember that one scene from the movie Signs? The one where the boy, the girl, Joaquin Phoenix (River Phoenix's brother for those who've never made he connection), and Mel Gibson all accidentally make a human antenna on top of the car and received the invading alien's radio transmission with crystal clarity through the baby monitor? That freaky, clicking sound through the cheap, Chinese-made, tiny speakers?

That is exactly the sound that the ravens here make.

Ravens are not crows, exactly. I think crows may be a type of raven, but the ravens here are not like the crows I once knew. Crows in Upstate New York are just a part of the wallpaper of life, blending in with ubiquitous roadside items like telephone poles, mail boxes, and that salt/sand grime that's on the side of the road this time of year. You don't notice them at all unless they do something unusual.

Here, ravens are big. Probably half again as big as crows. And they're smart. So smart that you just know it  when you see them.  And they speak many languages, including the one that the aliens from the movie Signs spoke.

NY crows really just know how to say, "CAAAW!" Whatever these ravens here are saying, it sounds exotic, complex, and deliberate.

My friend from work, has explained her reverence and hatred for these interesting birds. While she has once spent six weeks nursing a raven back to health and teaching it to fly again by running down the street with it on her arm, she's also summarily shot an entire clan of them who took to eating the back of her donkey, Samuel. 

She said that one also once picked up a copper wire, in its fascination for shiny things, and dropped it on the power line, shorting two wires, melting the copper, which dripped on the August-dry grass, and started a fire in front of the house she had just bought her mother.

My friend likes to buy people houses. 

According to wikipedia, ravens have a fascination with shiny things, almost like it's jewelery. 

"Common Ravens are known to steal and cache shiny objects such as pebbles, pieces of metal, and golf balls. One theory is that they hoard shiny objects to impress other ravens.^[53] Other research indicates that juveniles are deeply curious about all new things, and that Common Ravens retain an attraction to bright, round objects based on their similarity to bird eggs. Mature birds lose their intense interest in the unusual, and become highly neophobic.^[54]"

My work friend says that the ravens here are an invasive species, which has recently become pervasive and pushes other species out by raiding nests, stealing habitat, and general rudeness. 

But the reason I'm inspired to write about them today is because I witnessed one landing on our, I don't know what you call it, the "roof" over the porch that just has beams that block much of the sunlight, but not much else from above. Anyway it landed there and was immediately sprang upon by two different species of bird that I always see here who annoyed and attacked the raven twice their size until it flew off.

I've seen ravens fly above our house, but that was the first one I ever saw land on the property. Now I know why.