Hi wondering if anyone can help me work out this difficult one... I have some photos of a corvid calling in a gum tree. Wanting to know if it can be identified as which with the photos I took. I live in the mid North of South Australia too if that helps.
Hi,
It is very difficult to ID Australian corvids from pics only. The calls are much more helpful, try recording the call next time and posting it here, that should help ID the bird no problem.
Having said that, with the locality and the presence of throat-hackles in the pics, I would have a decent guess at a Little Raven.
Hi Wyverntales, an exact location would be great... There is a huge difference between Coober Pedy and Port Augusta.
As Robbierobot said, Australian corvids are a massive mess. To start, they are difficult to tell apart, and it has now emerged that their actual range is somewhat uncertain. The previous logic was that certain cities had thir 'resident' corvid... A. Raven in Perth and Sydney (and Canberra?); Forest Raven in Tas; Little Raven in Adelaide and Melbourne; Torresian Crow in any major towns north of Newcastle up into mid east Qld (and Darwin). However, this has been challenged on the grounds that as all the corvids look similar, people just expect to see certain ones in certain areas and report them. It was then extrapolated that if we don't know what corvids are in which towns and cities, we don't know their actual range. There was a link to a piece about the whole mess posted in a thread a while back, but I can't remember what it was called, sorry.
Perhaps it's just a coincedence that Forest Ravens are found north of Sydney and in southern Victoria, and not in and around those two cities. But then, any casual observer in Melbourne would be expecting to see a Little Raven, and in Sydney an Australian Raven...
Sorry can't help with the identification based off photos but to carry on from what Lachlan was saying..then there's the fact that genuine Aust. Ravens (may) show up occasionally around Melbourne. The fact that one species adapted to the urban environment in each city is a most interesting phenomenon.
The following links might be interesting:
http://birdlife.org.au/australian-birdlife/detail/the-trouble-with-ravens
http://birding-aus.org/australian-ravens-in-melbourne/
however the Melb records are doubted by some as well, see
http://www.birdlife.org.au/documents/ATL-Atlas-News16-Apr12.pdf
Thanks for having a go at the one. Yes the locality I gave is quite a big one... Peterborough South Australia. thought I'd see if anyone could help me out with my curiosity. I get so confused with all our corvids. A recording would help. Do they have different eye colours?
Michael Morcombe's Field Guide to the Birds of Australia tells me that all adult corvids of Australia have white eyes. Juvenile eyes "change from blue-grey through brown to hazel".
Around Peterborough SA you're likely to get Australian Ravens with their slow, higher pitched, drawn out call (the call of the outback as it's sometimes referred to), Little Ravens with a deeper call & Little Crows with their deeper (than the Australian Raven call), more rapid call than either the Australian Raven or Little Raven.
You might even get an Adelaide Crow with its colourful broad red, navy blue & gold stripes & with an extremely loud roar, especially when it kicks a goal between twigs.
Yes the Adelaide crow is a particularly colourful species Woko. I read somewhere that the way to tell a crow from a raven is to look at the base of its feathers. They are white on a crow and grey on a raven. So first grab your crow.........
Good one, Night Parrot.