Mysterious raven soars over R.I.

On a typical February afternoon (cold, but sunny) in Providence, I loitered at the vehicular-and-pedestrian-busy intersection of Smith Street and Academy Avenue.

Any minute, I would meet up with our son, Noah, who was about to leave high school at the end of the school day.

A bird moving south to north and roughly 200 feet overhead caught my eye. It was big, black, with a huge beak, and a clearly visible long, wedge-shaped tail.

The bird floated across the intersection in a flap-free flight that suggested a relatively powerful command of the airspace.

This was one of my favorite creatures, and not an everyday city sighting in New England. The bird was a common raven, with its characteristic silhouette and raptor-like flight, and it flew solo, which ravens often do.

In the Western Hemisphere, ravens are most often found in the West, from Mexico to Alaska, and to our north, particularly Canada.

For many years, a small number of ravens nested in northern Rhode Island, noted a friend, who tracks bird records in the Ocean State.

About five to six years ago, ravens also nested in South County, she said, plus in a few more places in the Rhode Island, including some of our urban terrain.

That uptick in the number of nesting ravens leveled off. And today, it is uncommon, but not impossible, to see a raven over Providence.

A raven is much larger than a crow. Typically, it holds its wings out and glides more often in flight than a crow, which flaps much more frequently. Raven wings also look slimmer, longer and narrower than those of crows.

In cultural myths and religions, the raven is seen as a guide, messenger, omen, symbol or some other character associated with luck, secrecy or other trait. Edgar Allan Poe, a sometime visitor to Providence, included one in his legendary poem “The Raven.” To many folks around the world, ravens have personalities!

Ravens eat pretty much anything, from berries to roadkill. Maybe it is because they eat decomposing flesh that many myths portray ravens as intermediaries between life and death.

As a person rooted in the urban Northeast, I see ravens as special. In our part of the Northern Hemisphere, I generally think of ravens as representative of where I’ve seen them, primarily the mountains of New Hampshire, New York and Vermont.

To me, the raven symbolizes both majesty of the air and mystery of the rugged outdoors. That remains true, even if I happen to see a raven soaring above one of the busiest intersections in the Ocean State.