Raven on a Fence Post, Mid-Blink

This is a raven on an old fence post up in Greer, and if you look at the eye you'll see it looks like somebody smeared it over with milky blue paint. It's not blind, and I didn't botch the edit (not this time anyway). That's the nictitating membrane, a third eyelid birds slide sideways across the eye to clean and protect it. It moves fast enough that you normally never notice it, so catching it in a frame is either a lucky accident or a ruined shot, depending on how you feel about a bird looking slightly possessed.

I'm keeping it, mostly because everything else in the frame came together. The bird is square on the post with its body toward me and its head turned off to the left, which gives you the profile of that bill and still lets you see the whole front of the bird. The feet are worth a look too, all those scaly toes and dark claws dug into the grain of the wood. The post itself is gray and cracked and weathered, and the background melted into soft greens and yellows with a little blue sky at the top, so there's nothing back there fighting the bird for attention.

Black birds in bright sun are a pain to expose for. Go too dark and you get a raven-shaped hole in the picture, go too bright and the background washes out. Here you can still pick out feather detail on the chest and the face, and there's some brownish fading on the wing and tail tips, which is just older feathers getting bleached and worn by the sun before they get replaced. Nobody looks their best right before a molt... ravens included.

Now, the raven versus crow question, because somebody always asks. Ravens are bigger, with a heavier bill, shaggy throat feathers, a wedge-shaped tail you can see in flight, and a deep croak instead of a caw. From one still frame of a bird sitting on a post with its tail folded, a fair amount of that is off the table, so I'm going with the name on the file and you're welcome to argue with me in the comments.

Greer sits up in the White Mountains at better than 8,000 feet, which is a nice change from the Tucson heat and a completely different set of birds. Ravens are one of the few you can count on seeing at both ends of the state, from the desert floor right up into the pines, usually watching you like they already know what's in your truck.