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[et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”]It depends on who you ask and what century you live in. Many of our collective nouns for animals are due to the language of courtly hunting brought to England by the French upper class in the middle ages. Others are poetic inventions that trace back to the fifteenth century in The Book of St Albans. The most popular in use today, an unkindness of ravens refers to a misguided 19th-century belief that ravens push their young out of the nest to survive as best they can. They don’t.
A conspiracy of ravens or a congress of ravens may come from a folktale that crows or ravens would gather and act as judge and jury if one of their kind has done wrong. If they were proven guilty by the rest of the flock, they would be killed.
My favorite, though rarely used and difficult to find the origins of (I couldn’t find the origins) is a storytelling of ravens.
So, I’m making up my own reason…
Ravens have a lot to say. They squawk and holler at each other and intruders. They coo and cluck and trill sweetly with their mate. I listen to crows and ravens a lot when walking outdoors and am frequently amazed to hear a new sound that I never heard before.
According to John Marzluff, Ph.D professor of wildlife science:
“The raven is the largest songbird and as such has a brain capable of continual song learning. New, useful, and intriguing noises can be memorized by the raven and imitated as near perfect renditions. These can be incorporated into a growing and individual repertoire. A complex social lifestyle, long lifespan, and songbird brain provides the motive and the machinery a raven needs to remain the most eloquent of avian orators.”
A few more fun collective nouns for animals:
- a tower of giraffes
- a prickle of porcupines
- a bloat of hippos
- A shrewdness of apes
- a knot of frogs
And for good measure here is a video of my other favorite bird collective noun:
A murmuration of Starlings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eFMNblMGcA[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column]
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