To The Sky
Raven, Yellowstone National Park. Also known as "hai" by one of the native peoples who lived in the area, the Shoshone. They're famously smart, social, emotionally expressive, playful, and beautiful to anyone who stops to truly admire them. They remind me of one of my favorite quotes about wildlife, "We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilizations surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." - Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod.