For the birds

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/10/2018 (2583 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ravens live wild and free at the Tower of London. If they leave, legend has it, the Tower will crumble into dust and great harm will befall the kingdom.

Not surprisingly, a ravenmaster is tasked to serve and protect them, encouraging them to stay.

Christopher Skaife, a yeoman warder (Beefeater) and current ravenmaster, is well-known to Tower visitors (he is photographed 300-400 times daily) and to thousands of followers on social media. Skaife and the birds are on Twitter, Instagram, where he posts daily raven photographs, and on the Historic Royal Palaces website where, front and centre, he and his charges are featured in YouTube videos (wfp.to/ravens).

“To be a good Yeoman Warder, you’ve got to be able to tell a good story,” he notes in his first book The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London. That he does and more.

Witty and bewitching, this is an informative, first-person account of Skaife’s interactions with seven unique birds and their personalities — Munin, Merlina, Erin, Rocky, Jubilee II, Gripp II and Harris (there has been one natural death since writing) — amid Tower and raven fact, myth and folklore, and Skaife’s own backstory.

For example, there is Munin’s “great escape” and cloak-and-dagger retrieval from Greenwich; the accidental death of her partner Thor, who once wished a “deep bass ‘Good Morning’ ” to the visiting Vladimir Putin (“He’d say hello to anybody, Thor.”); and Merlina’s fascination with the 888,246 ceramic poppies “planted” in the Tower moat in 2014 to commemorate the fallen British and Commonwealth soldiers of the First World War.

“I don’t have any official bird-related credentials or qualifications,” Skaife is quick to declare, yet he has worked with the ravens for 13 years (as ravenmaster for seven).

He rousts them at dawn in their pecking order; prepares their defrosted rats and blood-soaked dog biscuits; maintains vigilance for their safety (from other ravens, humans and, notably, foxes); and, at nightfall, urges them in reverse sequence back to their enclosures.

As ravenmaster, Skaife has introduced protective, raven-compatible nighttime enclosures and more conservative flight-feather trimming (a “haircut” a few times a year), enabling safe and satisfying aeronautics about the Tower. He has supplemented his ravenology by reading extensively and working with myriad avian experts who now consider him an expert as well.

Astonishingly, ravenmaster is an adjunct to Skaife’s duties as a yeoman warder, “a cross between being a security guard, a ceremonial guard, an amateur historian and a standup comedian.”

Consideration to become a yeoman warder requires at least 22 years of “unblemished service” in the British military. Through anecdotes and observations, Skaife relates his military experience (he was a machine-gun specialist and survival and interrogation resistance expert) to skills necessary to be ravenmaster: adherence to routine, attention to detail, mutual reliance and need for trust — evidently with his three ravenmaster’s assistants, and certainly with the birds.

The ravens are big, powerful problem-­solvers with long memories (Skaife calls them “feathered apes”) and bills “like Swiss Army knives.”

The ravens essentially perform at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Each raven has a recorded date for entering Tower service and can be declared AWOL (like Munin when on her escapade) or even be discharged and deemed SNLR (Service No Longer Required) like Bran, “an absolute brute of a bird (who) hated all humans.”

There is an amiable familiarity to Skaife’s writing, no doubt honed by his public-relations role. But there’s also beauty in it: “that proper morning smell of London, that mixture of exhaust fumes, the river, fresh ground coffee, and the beautiful sweet incongruous smell of fresh-cut grass on Tower Green.”

Ultimately, there is humility and reverence for the interconnectedness of species that should resound with readers of all ages and interests.

Gail Perry is a Winnipeg writer with a mother from London, England, and husband from London, Ont.