We live in a particular part of the redwood forest near Mendocino favored by ravens, not to be confused with crows.
The ravens in our neighborhood check out what’s going on at our house multiple times a day. Within minutes of a package being delivered and left outside our gate, a raven or ravens will descend and with his/her/their incredibly sharp beak(s) decimate the cardboard box to see what lies within.
The ravens are also keen on the prune plums and apples growing in our orchard. Throughout the growing season, ravens will sample plums and apples until they consider the fruit optimally ripe. When the time is ripe, they send word to their brethren and a flock of the big black birds descend on our little trees to feast and carry fruit away to their nests.
As it happens, our ravens generally like to harvest our apples and plums a week or so before we ideally like to harvest the fruit. So sometimes we net our trees to keep the ravens from getting too much of the fruit, but this is a royal pain, so more often I daily monitor the ravens monitoring the fruit, and when the pace of their sampling grows frenetic, we harvest.
This is what happened yesterday when I went out to the orchard. I found two big ravens devouring apples from our most prolific tree and I decided the time had come to pick those apples while there were still some left to pick.
In other news, we’re coming to the end of rose-blooming time around here. Roses, as you probably know, are in the botanical family Rosaceae and share a common ancestor with apples, pears, plums, cherries, strawberries, and almonds.
If you cut an apple in half sideways, not along the core, you will see a star shape formed by the seeds. And if you cut a rose hip sideways, you will see that same star shape.
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