Two bird theory!

People who regularly glance at 'BoTH' will have seen that I posted some images of a possible Raven yesterday: some most welcome input from a couple of more knowledgeable birders caused me to realise that the bird I photographed was, in fact, a Rook. This might seem an incredibly bad piece of i/d (and, in many ways, so it is!) but there is a back story: I'm not at all certain that the bird I managed to photograph was the one I originally thought was a Raven.

I had noticed a group of corvids flying westwards over Buckenham: they were mobbing a considerably larger bird with obvious heavy moult. I had seen Steve Smith's images of a Raven he'd taken with just such feather loss and drew the obvious conclusion. I watched the group with binoculars for a minute or so as they approached. Raising my camera, I took half a dozen photos of what I believed to be the bird in question as it flew past over the river. I honestly now think I'd focused on the wrong bird, purely because, through the viewfinder, I could see feather loss.

Silly error: but not life-threatening! In my 'defence', I'd just point out that I was the finder of a pair of breeding Ravens in north-west Norfolk a couple of years back, and have seen hundreds of them in the UK and abroad. The multiple image shows a Rook, my 'raven' and a helpful image sent to me by Ben L of a Raven that he'd seen at Brundall! Below that is the Raven I found in 2018 and yesterday's Rook, showing its moult.