Why have the songbirds that protect the Tower of London been branded 'trickster Gods' and 'butcher crows'?
Considering that it was Edgar Allan Poe’s avian muse, the raven has a bloodthirsty reputation that isn’t entirely deserved.
The raven has so many superlatives attached to its name that the bird is almost a creature apart. It is the largest member of the crow family worldwide. It is also among the heaviest songbirds on Earth. Of avian species in our hemisphere, it is the most widespread — from the icebound lands well within the Arctic Circle to 1,400ft below sea level at the Dead Sea.
Perhaps more than anything else, it is a bird more steeped in human story than most. With the chicken, dove and eagle, the raven is an archetype for our imaginations: to the indigenous peoples of America and Asia it was a kind of trickster god woven into their creation stories of the Sun, the Moon and of humanity itself. For all this exalted status between our ears, real-life ravens out in the British wilds have an altogether less certain place.
In the 19th century, the birds were reviled and persecuted until they had been exterminated in all but the mountains and upland moors of western Britain. No longer. From these old redoubts, the corvid with the pickaxe bill and deeply resonant ‘cronking’ call began a revival this century. Ravens have spread to lowland counties and a 2016 census suggested a national figure of 10,000 pairs, more than double the population in the 1990s and almost certainly now an underestimate.
Ravens have been known to perform extraordinary breeding displays.
The species had long survived on the rugged coastlines of Cornwall and Devon, but it made a steady advance through Sussex and Kent and into East Anglia. In all those areas, you can once more see them perform their extraordinary breeding displays, when an airborne bird rolls over momentarily on to its back to fly upside down.
Unthinkable in the 20th century is the appearance of ravens in London. When people mention ravens in the capital, we can no longer be sure that they mean the ceremonial bird that has long been on display at the Tower.
As I’ve claimed the bird as the ultimate source of story in Britain, I cannot omit a wonderful raven tale from Derbyshire. The species was extinguished in the 1850s and remained absent until the 1980s. Yet, when the birds returned to nest in the Peak District, they chose as their first site an old limestone crag that had always been known as Ravencliffe Cave.
'Butcher crows': Another unfair nickname given to ravens.
Ravens had thus closed the circle and, more than 130 years after they had been lost, returned to a place named in their honour. With the raven’s remarkable recovery, how-ever, have come less welcome stories.
The bird has an intimate association with death and the old Welsh name cigfran means ‘butcher crow’. It denotes an ancient taste for carrion, although it is worth highlighting that ravens are omnivores. ‘From a worm to a whale’ is a famous summary of their diet. On occasions, this catholicity is known to include young lambs and even adult ewes and newborn calves.
Licences have been issued periodically to control ravens where the problem is intense, notably in Wales in 2015 and in Orkney the following year. The latter campaign, spread across several seasons, led to 124 ravens being killed. In 2025, nine different landowners on the islands sought to cull a further 30 birds. However, not all such planned operations gain approval.
Ravens aren’t a clear-cut threat to livestock, despite their many critics.
A similar licence sought in Perthshire, partly to protect ground-nesting waders, including curlews and lapwings, from the perceived risks of ravens, was challenged and turned down.
The problem is that ravens aren’t a clear-cut threat to livestock. Studies in western Scotland, examining the impact of crows and ravens upon sheep, revealed that three-quarters of lamb carcasses taken by the birds were already dead or so weak at birth they were unlikely to survive. Even in an age of the species’ heavy persecution, Lt-Col Ryves, in his Bird Life in Cornwall (1948) suggested he had witnessed ravens feeding peacefully among sheep for decades and never seen a single attack.
What we do know is that issues can arise. Ravens can be problematic. The risks have increased with the recent resurrection in raven fortunes. Yet the bad old days of knee-jerk prejudice and systematic extermination will never return again.
This feature originally appeared in the July 8, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
