Given their exposure to the most miserable conditions, particularly the relentlessly waterlogged ground and overgrazed sward, I’m surprised that the dead sheep on nearby fields numbered just four last month. One upside to this mortality was that the local ravens made light weather of a sodden winter. “From a worm to a whale” is the phrase that best summarises the astonishing prey range taken by the world’s largest songbird. A scour of my library, however, threw up two delicious titbits that I’ve never previously encountered: vulture vomit and an American passage that talked of ravens “fighting for the steaming dung as soon as dropped by dogs”. This same book also described one of my favourite birds as a “filthy feeder”. Yet the thing that struck me from hours of watching ravens is the complexity of their behaviour around food. Out of a maximum of 24 birds, there were rarely more than four or five on the carcass at once. The others hopped about comically, or played with pieces of windblown vegetation, or circled overhead, sometimes in sonorous voice, and partaking of closely synchronised pair-bonding flights. Vultures will famously gorge until an individual can be too heavy to take off and must rest overnight. But the ravens seemed far more fastidious. There was generally little aggression, which was presumably mediated by some lovely moments of dominance display. Individuals occasionally puffed out their splendid throat hackles and raised over each eye a stiff ridge of black plumelets, which made the whole head look disproportionately enormous and gave to it odd associations with military costume. Another notable detail was the period spent resting after each visit to the carcass, when birds sat on adjacent posts as they processed the contents of their presumably full crop. For all this there was no doubting their ravenous purpose. There was one glorious moment when snow in huge flakes raked the landscape and swept through my telescope image like heavy static on an electric screen. Beyond it, I could just make out ravens beautifully aligned in the lea of a swollen sheep’s belly, but tugging and jabbing with flint beaks as they sheltered from the elements.