By Mikal Jakubal
“Huh?”
That was my first thought as I drove by the woman holding the sign in Redway this morning. Being one of the more unusual protest signs I’d ever seen, I pulled over and walked back.
Here’s the short version that I got from her, paraphrasing a bit since I didn’t record it. She (who didn’t want to be in the photo) says she feeds the ravens in town. For the last four years there have been consistently 70-80 of them every morning. In less than a week, that number has dropped to 40-45, with several dead ones being found around town with blood coming from their beaks. “Word on the street is that one of the merchants put a bounty on them and then put out poison because they were pecking at the roof of his building.”
She says the local Fish And Game officials don’t care, but the local Native American tribes, for whom the raven is sacred, do care and so does the U.S. Dept. Of Interior. She said people can call KMUD radio if they find a dead bird.
I asked her about the SoHum pot connection and she explained it so: “This is a community that likes to take care of its own problems. So, if people don’t do something to stop the killing of the ravens, the Native people will. They’ll bring the officials and the TV cameras and it will give SoHum pot a bad name.” I asked whether she thought anyone would really notice or make the connection. “Well, if people have a choice to buy weed from, say, Hawaii or from a place where white people kill the ravens, I think they’ll chose the other place, so boycott SoHum weed until it stops.”
She wasn’t suggesting at all that it was growers who were killing the ravens, so I’m not quite sure of her logic there.
Anyone else hear anything about this?
Mikal, I have been talking to the protestor as well and at least one part of her story did not hold up to further inquiry. According to our local substation, no calls from the BIA have been received, as was her statement to me. The deputy sheriff said that he did not know about calls to the county sheriff’s office up north.
It was not known if the DFG would be pursuing this, or just marginalizing the protestor’s testimony because of who she is.
Since starting to run with the rumor, I have since slowed to a crawl. If her statement to me wasn’t correct about the BIA involvement, am I to believe her statements implying culpability on the part of those she has accused?
As someone on Kym’s blog commented, rumor hashing is a waste, “Show us the bodies”. I have alerted a number of Redway locals to the rumor, and its contradictions, in hopes of getting more reports about possible reductions in the raven population.
I will state that I have heard that the woman’s past raven feeding in different Redway locales have earned her some neighborhood wrath as the ravens then come to that area waiting for feedings and do havoc to older rooftops.
Yeah, from what I’ve also heard, I’m skeptical until there is hard, dead evidence. My thought is that 45 dead ravens in a week should be showing up around town pretty regularly. I think she might be a little, um…[trying to be polite on a public blog]…”off.”
Still, I shot the photo, talked to her and published the story mostly as a way to give people a quirky angle into the local culture. Irrespective of the tortuous logic, the mere fact that she suggested boycotting weed gives it a uniquely SoHum interest.
This place never ceases to amaze.
yo
(Comment to “Joe”: I’m not going to publish your comment because it is a bit too much of a personal slur. See my comment above. You’ll see that I agree with you. I try to keep that stuff to a minimum here.)
Definitely an interesting part of our quirky local culture. If she is feeding the Ravens on a regular basis and it’s true that someone is killing the birds, then she is partly responsible for killing them. By providing them with an artificial food supply she encourages them to congregate in unnaturally high numbers. An urbanized raven with nothing to do between easy feedings can get into mischief, so it wouldn’t be surprising that someone would get ticked off at them. Something else being overlooked is that ravens are very mobile and will suddenly leave an area for better pickings somewhere else. In the best interest of these wild creatures we can help keep them wild by not feeding them and keeping garbage and compost secured in tightly covered cans and bins.
Hi Uti,
Thanks for the comment. I’m responding to it in a new post, since it got me thinking.
The hindu man that manages the Johnston Motel in garberville feeds the ravens regularly…