Description
Measuring 46–53 cm (18–21 in) in length with a 100 cm (40 in) wingspan and weighing around 650 g, the adult Australian Raven is an all black bird with black feet and beak and a white iris. The plumage is glossy with a blue-purple to blue-green sheen, greenish over the ear coverts, depending on light. The underparts are not glossy. Its throat feathers (hackles) are longer than those of other species. It can be distinguished from the two species of crow occurring in Australia by the grey base of the feathers, which is white in the latter species. Juveniles resemble adults, but have dark eyes, shorter throat hackles, and sometimes have a pink fleshy gape.
The territorial call of the Australian Raven is a slow, high ah-ah-aaaah with the last note drawn out. It will use this call to communicate with other Australian Ravens in the area. The five Australian species are very difficult to tell apart, with the call being the easiest way to do so.
Read more about this topic: Australian Raven
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“It [Egypt] has more wonders in it than any other country in the world and provides more works that defy description than any other place.”
—Herodotus (c. 484–424 B.C.)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)