Epiphany on Pilot Mountain
~
How the Raven
Set My Soul to Rights
First published in the February 2011 issue of
Wildlife in North Carolina magazine and again in the
September-October 2015 issue of Birdwatcher's Digest
For some of us it can seem, in this hyperkinetic world of universal homogenization and the relentless development of our remaining mountains, farmland and coastlines, that everything is going to hell. North Carolina has in my lifetime become the hottest commodity in East Coast real estate. The influx of newcomers and the resulting conversion of open space to development have been well and good for our friends in the construction and agribusiness industries, but it has definitely been a mixed blessing for those who might recall and perhaps regret losing a Carolina of quiet Piedmont farms bracketed by uncluttered shores and the verdant Blue Ridge.
I’m of the latter mindset, myself. My aunt and uncle had lived in Tyrrell County most of my life, and their proximity to the Outer Banks had made their home the natural destination for my mother’s side of the family for summers that stretched back to the mid-1970s. I moved to Raleigh shortly after law school partly to be close to these favorite relatives and also to revisit a state that had long ago claimed a substantial piece of my heart, only to find myself dejectedly encysted in an upwardly immobile government position. A few weeks into it, I knew I needed a break.
Though I’d long ago given up on the Outer Banks as a spiritual destination, there was still the mountainous west, those long blue slopes of hardwood climbing to spruce-fir stands that harbor endemic species left anchored there since the last glaciers. The mountains, or rather one stumpy sentinel squatting alone in the western Piedmont, would still be home to some of the old restorative magic. What’s more there was a peculiar visit I hoped to make, a call on an old friend whose enigmatic comfort I had periodically found up in the wilds of New England during those bleak years of self-induced suffering through the boot camp of law school.
May Day, 2000 AD. I am negotiating my way through the customary madness of the I-40 morning rush hour when suddenly, as if escaping the clutches of an ebb tide, I find myself ejected into the undulating pastoral calm of northern Forsyth County, following U.S. 52 up to Pilot Mountain State Park to visit with my acquaintance. I’m not expected, but I hope the reception will nonetheless be as open and generous as in years past. I am in need of the kindness of strangers, and few of our fellow creatures are as strange and alluring as the Northern raven.
Weeks previously, feeling the need for solitude and natural reconnection that periodically afflicts me when I find myself boxed into cubicles and concrete office buildings, I had done some cyber-snooping and learned that ravens were endemic to Pilot Mountain in a small population that nested on the pinnacle’s naked stone flanks.
I’d been beguiled by the raven’s size, stature, good looks and applied intelligence since first encountering the species in various places in the West, and then more intimately during my postgraduate stint in New England. The raven is the crow’s bigger brother and the largest songbird in North America, and something about their ominous call, their carven cruciform shadow in the sky and their general reluctance to deal overmuch with the doings of mankind spoke to my own misanthropic mindset (law school will do that to you) and made an indelible mark on my consciousness.
For years after graduation I would in times of stress recall the strange peace I’d felt when, deep in the north woods of Vermont, that distant croaking yelp floated down to me from above, signaling the presence of a kindred spirit somewhere nearby. In those tremulous days of angst and anxiety over grades and a future career, the long solo hikes I’d taken into the Green Mountains were a necessary solace, and when, as was often the case, I was blessed with a raven’s accompaniment along the way, my return to the classroom was that much more agreeable.
A previous raven search, to the enticingly named Raven Rock State Park in Harnett County, had been a wonderful time spent rambling about the overhanging cliffs along the Cape Fear River but produced no ravens, the park’s titular species having been driven out by logging decades ago. I chose Pilot Mountain for my next raven pilgrimage because it was closer to me than the Blue Ridge and also because its setting as a lonely peak in the midst of the rolling western Piedmont seemed too alluring to pass up. Pilot Mountain has been used as a waypoint and guidepost for hunters and traders for thousands of years; I wished to use it as a means of revisiting an old friend and, I hoped, tasting again that soaring sense of empathy I’d felt during previous contact.
What mere bird could afford such consolation? The common or Northern raven (Corvus corax) is the most widespread of all corvid (crow-like) birds, a circumpolar species native to northern and western North America, the Mediterranean basin, northern Europe and much of Asia. Ravens have a wingspan of over 4 feet, a length of around 27 inches from bill to tail tip and a weight of over 2 ½ pounds, four times as heavy as their taxonomic allies the crows.
Cloaked in ebony feathers that direct sunlight can roil into marbled arabesques of metallic greens and purples, the species is possessed of a powerful bill up to 3 ¼ inches long with a slight hook at the end of the upper mandible to facilitate the tearing of meat. The birds are heavily bearded with thick, bristling whiskers and throat feathers that can be ruffed out to touch the ground at times of excited communication or in courtship.
Though ravens superficially resemble common crows (Corvus brachyrhinchos), their greater size and distinct vocalizations denote another animal altogether. The raven’s complex social structure is dependent upon intricate vocalizations that, like our own, vary from place to place in distinct dialects or accents. Ravens are believed to have greater diversity of vocal patterns than any other animal except humans, with calls and cries ranging from a foreboding awk to the sound of rushing water to knocking, trilling, gurgling and bubbling sounds. Ravens are excellent mimics as well, having been documented as replicating gunfire, automobile engines, chain saws, church bells and even human speech rendered as faithfully as a macaw.
The raven’s remarkable powers of flight supersede those of crows and indeed any other songbird. Ravens can twist and turn in the air like the nimblest of raptors, dive with astounding speed, fly upside down for considerable distances, and even soar on fully outstretched wings like hawks and eagles. And as complex and successful as is the social system of the common crow, raven society is even more intricate, cohesive and astonishing. When walking in raven country, we are in the presence of an intelligent and enterprising tribe of beings with a language, social hierarchy and network of personal relationships that mirror our own.
I arrived at Pilot Mountain a little before noon, found a suitably distant campsite, strapped on boots and canteen and headed for Big Pinnacle, that isolated knob of quartzite almost 2,500 feet high that rose unbidden from the ancient landscape climbing westward toward the Blue Ridge foothills. This isolated and irregular geological feature, remnant of the primordial Sauratown Mountains, provided the proper elevation and climate to support flora and fauna otherwise not encountered until high in the Blue Ridge. The mountain’s microclimate, a tiny piece of a much larger puzzle separated by miles of lowland farms and freeways, must be a challenging habitat for those more northern species that eke out a living on this miniature sky island far from their Appalachian kin.
To make it here, animals must be supremely adapted to their environment and able to take whatever nourishment comes their way. Consistently successful foraging is crucial to a bird whose range covers mountains, deserts and everything in between. They prey on the eggs and young of other birds, rodents, grains, worms, insects, fresh carrion, and our plentiful human garbage. Though generally solitary foragers, ravens sometimes gather to hunt larger game cooperatively.
Both sexes construct a ponderous nest of freshly broken limbs, usually on naked stone slopes or high up an evergreen tree. The four to five young, hatched in the early spring, are devotedly attended to by both parents. Even suburbanized crows nest away from the racket of human society, but wilderness-loving ravens prefer even more distance between themselves and mankind, nesting deep in mature forestland and along lonely cliff faces such as the scoured and broken battlements of the Big Pinnacle I was now admiring from below. Turkey vultures skimmed the treetops and circled the great knob’s forested head, but no thick black crosses with pointed heads and tails darkened the spring sky. I kept hiking upward.
Ravens evolved in the great coniferous forests of the Northern Hemisphere’s subarctic taiga, where food derived from trees and other plants is scarce during the brief summers and almost nonexistent during the long months of cold and darkness. Therefore, like polar bears, grizzlies, wolves, owls and hawks, as well as the humans who have made the subarctic their home for millennia, ravens depend upon meat to survive.
Like wolves and men, ravens have developed a highly regarded social polity in which cooperation and altruism yield results for the entire tribe. Ravens were the first birds documented as actively inviting others of their kind to join in communal feasting when food is discovered, and whether or not the behavior began as a defensive means of providing “strength in numbers” when approaching a potential trap or similar danger, ravens today routinely call out for reinforcements before taking their first peck off a winter-killed deer, a bear’s or coyote’s leftovers or a humble garbage heap.
The sun was growing hotter and the hours trickled by as I circled the switchbacks that girdle Big Pinnacle, stumbling over the plentiful stones on the trail as my eyes roamed the rocky flanks for bushel basket-sized nests of branches and evergreen boughs. Dazzling roseate blossoms of rhododendron crowded me on both sides as I pushed through stands of trailside mountain laurel with their dense bunches of fragrant white flowers. The thick pregnant breeze of spring made a suspirating hissss as it passed slowly through the pines, bringing with it at last the heart-stopping sound I’d come to hear: Awk! Awk awk awk!
I immediately froze and went into a crouch in the shade of the laurels, scanning the skies around the pinnacle for movement. As usual the raven’s call was indistinct in its proximity. The bird sounded as though it could be either around the next corner or half a mile away. After listening for additional calls I got up and went on, encouraged by this evidence that at least one raven remained here—already my eyes felt brighter and a strange excitement burned behind them, the accumulated scales from weeks of urban tension falling away as I trotted further up the incline toward my hoped-for rendezvous.
Noah sent a white raven out to reconnoiter as the Flood began to recede; the raven, sensibly following its own agenda, began feeding on a floating carcass instead, so Noah released a dove and God turned the raven black for not sticking to the script. For Europeans, accustomed over thousands of years to seeing these great black birds feasting upon the sprawling remains of the continent’s countless battlefields, the raven naturally became associated with portents of doom.
Creator, trickster, harbinger of death, the raven’s image has darkened the minds of seers and sages since the Stone Age. For me, after years of silent enjoyment and wonder, the raven has come to represent wisdom, liberty, prophesy and ... humor. Few other species seem to have so much fun with themselves and others. I’ve seen ravens chasing red-tailed hawks for the sheer wide-eyed hell of it, pulling their rusty tail feathers before peeling away in another direction as the hawks, with a somewhat different outlook on comedy, tear off in pursuit of their tormenters.
But the greatest testament to the raven’s social and acrobatic skills, something I’d witnessed only once before at the time, lay in wait for me as I rounded the next stony shoulder of the trail. Mopping the sweat from my eyes, I glanced up in time to see two ravens out over the woodlands below me, almost at eye level as they tranquilly circled one another in widening gyres, gradually ascending in the afternoon sun until they were nearly invisible to the unaided eye.
I kept my 8x32s on the pair, which were evidently conducting a mating ritual though they had most likely already nested, as together they floated the thermal updraft to its peak then lazily went their separate ways, losing altitude before slicing rapidly back toward each other with nary a wing beat. Meeting again, one bird flipped over and locked claws with its mate, and they fell, one over the other, back to earth, a ragged glittering wheel of bone, nerve and feather shining blackly in the fading sunlight.
As the couple dropped down, down, down, my breath stopped, my heart stopped. At the nadir of their fall, about 50 feet from the treetops, the ravens broke apart and each rocketed upward like two great arms raised to Heaven, there to reunite and paddle around the pinnacle to their perch. I felt then like I was the one man on Earth to be privileged with this gift.
Later that evening, brooding over my campfire and still in the glow of the moment, I saw things from a more enlightened perspective. The endless troubles of life in our era are an inescapable burden, and mine are no greater than anyone else’s. The existential despair that had haunted my last several months, that sense of a path not taken and a dream unfulfilled, would be waiting for me back in Raleigh. But now I had a new courage to see my way through in making the unpleasant choices that come with the pursuit of happiness. An unlikely ally had come to my aid, unasked and uncompensated.
The sun went down in flames as a storm crept in from the southwest. Again I wonder what the world will be like when all of the mundane, urgent problems of our lives are finally over, and a new, older world is left standing in our stead. In the last light I hear the thunder rolling, the first patter of raindrops on new leaves, and from somewhere above a final comment on the wonder, terror and beauty of it all...
Awk! Awk awk awk!
I’m of the latter mindset, myself. My aunt and uncle had lived in Tyrrell County most of my life, and their proximity to the Outer Banks had made their home the natural destination for my mother’s side of the family for summers that stretched back to the mid-1970s. I moved to Raleigh shortly after law school partly to be close to these favorite relatives and also to revisit a state that had long ago claimed a substantial piece of my heart, only to find myself dejectedly encysted in an upwardly immobile government position. A few weeks into it, I knew I needed a break.
Though I’d long ago given up on the Outer Banks as a spiritual destination, there was still the mountainous west, those long blue slopes of hardwood climbing to spruce-fir stands that harbor endemic species left anchored there since the last glaciers. The mountains, or rather one stumpy sentinel squatting alone in the western Piedmont, would still be home to some of the old restorative magic. What’s more there was a peculiar visit I hoped to make, a call on an old friend whose enigmatic comfort I had periodically found up in the wilds of New England during those bleak years of self-induced suffering through the boot camp of law school.
May Day, 2000 AD. I am negotiating my way through the customary madness of the I-40 morning rush hour when suddenly, as if escaping the clutches of an ebb tide, I find myself ejected into the undulating pastoral calm of northern Forsyth County, following U.S. 52 up to Pilot Mountain State Park to visit with my acquaintance. I’m not expected, but I hope the reception will nonetheless be as open and generous as in years past. I am in need of the kindness of strangers, and few of our fellow creatures are as strange and alluring as the Northern raven.
Weeks previously, feeling the need for solitude and natural reconnection that periodically afflicts me when I find myself boxed into cubicles and concrete office buildings, I had done some cyber-snooping and learned that ravens were endemic to Pilot Mountain in a small population that nested on the pinnacle’s naked stone flanks.
I’d been beguiled by the raven’s size, stature, good looks and applied intelligence since first encountering the species in various places in the West, and then more intimately during my postgraduate stint in New England. The raven is the crow’s bigger brother and the largest songbird in North America, and something about their ominous call, their carven cruciform shadow in the sky and their general reluctance to deal overmuch with the doings of mankind spoke to my own misanthropic mindset (law school will do that to you) and made an indelible mark on my consciousness.
For years after graduation I would in times of stress recall the strange peace I’d felt when, deep in the north woods of Vermont, that distant croaking yelp floated down to me from above, signaling the presence of a kindred spirit somewhere nearby. In those tremulous days of angst and anxiety over grades and a future career, the long solo hikes I’d taken into the Green Mountains were a necessary solace, and when, as was often the case, I was blessed with a raven’s accompaniment along the way, my return to the classroom was that much more agreeable.
A previous raven search, to the enticingly named Raven Rock State Park in Harnett County, had been a wonderful time spent rambling about the overhanging cliffs along the Cape Fear River but produced no ravens, the park’s titular species having been driven out by logging decades ago. I chose Pilot Mountain for my next raven pilgrimage because it was closer to me than the Blue Ridge and also because its setting as a lonely peak in the midst of the rolling western Piedmont seemed too alluring to pass up. Pilot Mountain has been used as a waypoint and guidepost for hunters and traders for thousands of years; I wished to use it as a means of revisiting an old friend and, I hoped, tasting again that soaring sense of empathy I’d felt during previous contact.
What mere bird could afford such consolation? The common or Northern raven (Corvus corax) is the most widespread of all corvid (crow-like) birds, a circumpolar species native to northern and western North America, the Mediterranean basin, northern Europe and much of Asia. Ravens have a wingspan of over 4 feet, a length of around 27 inches from bill to tail tip and a weight of over 2 ½ pounds, four times as heavy as their taxonomic allies the crows.
Cloaked in ebony feathers that direct sunlight can roil into marbled arabesques of metallic greens and purples, the species is possessed of a powerful bill up to 3 ¼ inches long with a slight hook at the end of the upper mandible to facilitate the tearing of meat. The birds are heavily bearded with thick, bristling whiskers and throat feathers that can be ruffed out to touch the ground at times of excited communication or in courtship.
Though ravens superficially resemble common crows (Corvus brachyrhinchos), their greater size and distinct vocalizations denote another animal altogether. The raven’s complex social structure is dependent upon intricate vocalizations that, like our own, vary from place to place in distinct dialects or accents. Ravens are believed to have greater diversity of vocal patterns than any other animal except humans, with calls and cries ranging from a foreboding awk to the sound of rushing water to knocking, trilling, gurgling and bubbling sounds. Ravens are excellent mimics as well, having been documented as replicating gunfire, automobile engines, chain saws, church bells and even human speech rendered as faithfully as a macaw.
The raven’s remarkable powers of flight supersede those of crows and indeed any other songbird. Ravens can twist and turn in the air like the nimblest of raptors, dive with astounding speed, fly upside down for considerable distances, and even soar on fully outstretched wings like hawks and eagles. And as complex and successful as is the social system of the common crow, raven society is even more intricate, cohesive and astonishing. When walking in raven country, we are in the presence of an intelligent and enterprising tribe of beings with a language, social hierarchy and network of personal relationships that mirror our own.
I arrived at Pilot Mountain a little before noon, found a suitably distant campsite, strapped on boots and canteen and headed for Big Pinnacle, that isolated knob of quartzite almost 2,500 feet high that rose unbidden from the ancient landscape climbing westward toward the Blue Ridge foothills. This isolated and irregular geological feature, remnant of the primordial Sauratown Mountains, provided the proper elevation and climate to support flora and fauna otherwise not encountered until high in the Blue Ridge. The mountain’s microclimate, a tiny piece of a much larger puzzle separated by miles of lowland farms and freeways, must be a challenging habitat for those more northern species that eke out a living on this miniature sky island far from their Appalachian kin.
To make it here, animals must be supremely adapted to their environment and able to take whatever nourishment comes their way. Consistently successful foraging is crucial to a bird whose range covers mountains, deserts and everything in between. They prey on the eggs and young of other birds, rodents, grains, worms, insects, fresh carrion, and our plentiful human garbage. Though generally solitary foragers, ravens sometimes gather to hunt larger game cooperatively.
Both sexes construct a ponderous nest of freshly broken limbs, usually on naked stone slopes or high up an evergreen tree. The four to five young, hatched in the early spring, are devotedly attended to by both parents. Even suburbanized crows nest away from the racket of human society, but wilderness-loving ravens prefer even more distance between themselves and mankind, nesting deep in mature forestland and along lonely cliff faces such as the scoured and broken battlements of the Big Pinnacle I was now admiring from below. Turkey vultures skimmed the treetops and circled the great knob’s forested head, but no thick black crosses with pointed heads and tails darkened the spring sky. I kept hiking upward.
Ravens evolved in the great coniferous forests of the Northern Hemisphere’s subarctic taiga, where food derived from trees and other plants is scarce during the brief summers and almost nonexistent during the long months of cold and darkness. Therefore, like polar bears, grizzlies, wolves, owls and hawks, as well as the humans who have made the subarctic their home for millennia, ravens depend upon meat to survive.
Like wolves and men, ravens have developed a highly regarded social polity in which cooperation and altruism yield results for the entire tribe. Ravens were the first birds documented as actively inviting others of their kind to join in communal feasting when food is discovered, and whether or not the behavior began as a defensive means of providing “strength in numbers” when approaching a potential trap or similar danger, ravens today routinely call out for reinforcements before taking their first peck off a winter-killed deer, a bear’s or coyote’s leftovers or a humble garbage heap.
The sun was growing hotter and the hours trickled by as I circled the switchbacks that girdle Big Pinnacle, stumbling over the plentiful stones on the trail as my eyes roamed the rocky flanks for bushel basket-sized nests of branches and evergreen boughs. Dazzling roseate blossoms of rhododendron crowded me on both sides as I pushed through stands of trailside mountain laurel with their dense bunches of fragrant white flowers. The thick pregnant breeze of spring made a suspirating hissss as it passed slowly through the pines, bringing with it at last the heart-stopping sound I’d come to hear: Awk! Awk awk awk!
I immediately froze and went into a crouch in the shade of the laurels, scanning the skies around the pinnacle for movement. As usual the raven’s call was indistinct in its proximity. The bird sounded as though it could be either around the next corner or half a mile away. After listening for additional calls I got up and went on, encouraged by this evidence that at least one raven remained here—already my eyes felt brighter and a strange excitement burned behind them, the accumulated scales from weeks of urban tension falling away as I trotted further up the incline toward my hoped-for rendezvous.
Noah sent a white raven out to reconnoiter as the Flood began to recede; the raven, sensibly following its own agenda, began feeding on a floating carcass instead, so Noah released a dove and God turned the raven black for not sticking to the script. For Europeans, accustomed over thousands of years to seeing these great black birds feasting upon the sprawling remains of the continent’s countless battlefields, the raven naturally became associated with portents of doom.
Creator, trickster, harbinger of death, the raven’s image has darkened the minds of seers and sages since the Stone Age. For me, after years of silent enjoyment and wonder, the raven has come to represent wisdom, liberty, prophesy and ... humor. Few other species seem to have so much fun with themselves and others. I’ve seen ravens chasing red-tailed hawks for the sheer wide-eyed hell of it, pulling their rusty tail feathers before peeling away in another direction as the hawks, with a somewhat different outlook on comedy, tear off in pursuit of their tormenters.
But the greatest testament to the raven’s social and acrobatic skills, something I’d witnessed only once before at the time, lay in wait for me as I rounded the next stony shoulder of the trail. Mopping the sweat from my eyes, I glanced up in time to see two ravens out over the woodlands below me, almost at eye level as they tranquilly circled one another in widening gyres, gradually ascending in the afternoon sun until they were nearly invisible to the unaided eye.
I kept my 8x32s on the pair, which were evidently conducting a mating ritual though they had most likely already nested, as together they floated the thermal updraft to its peak then lazily went their separate ways, losing altitude before slicing rapidly back toward each other with nary a wing beat. Meeting again, one bird flipped over and locked claws with its mate, and they fell, one over the other, back to earth, a ragged glittering wheel of bone, nerve and feather shining blackly in the fading sunlight.
As the couple dropped down, down, down, my breath stopped, my heart stopped. At the nadir of their fall, about 50 feet from the treetops, the ravens broke apart and each rocketed upward like two great arms raised to Heaven, there to reunite and paddle around the pinnacle to their perch. I felt then like I was the one man on Earth to be privileged with this gift.
Later that evening, brooding over my campfire and still in the glow of the moment, I saw things from a more enlightened perspective. The endless troubles of life in our era are an inescapable burden, and mine are no greater than anyone else’s. The existential despair that had haunted my last several months, that sense of a path not taken and a dream unfulfilled, would be waiting for me back in Raleigh. But now I had a new courage to see my way through in making the unpleasant choices that come with the pursuit of happiness. An unlikely ally had come to my aid, unasked and uncompensated.
The sun went down in flames as a storm crept in from the southwest. Again I wonder what the world will be like when all of the mundane, urgent problems of our lives are finally over, and a new, older world is left standing in our stead. In the last light I hear the thunder rolling, the first patter of raindrops on new leaves, and from somewhere above a final comment on the wonder, terror and beauty of it all...
Awk! Awk awk awk!
