Australian Raven

It has been raining since we arrived at Sydney. Not an ideal weather for birding, so we are stuck to birding from the balcony. The ever present urban bird, the crow, was the first to get my attention. Their stunning white iris, caught my eye. Never had I seen a raven/crow with white iris!
Well, it turns out that at least five of the Aussie crows/ raven's have white iris. The biggest confusion though comes, when identifying the Australian Raven (Corvus coronoides ), which looks very similar to the Australian Crow / Torresian crow.
One of the very sure shot way of identifying the raven is by its call. The below video shows the call of a raven.

The raven has an arrr arrrr arrrrrrrrrrrrrr call. The last arrrrrrrr is long and stretches to its lung capacity (sounds like a constipating human).
The crow sounds very different from it- more like uk uk.
The raven also has a much more glossy, bluish black feathers and longer feathers around its neck.
Now among Ravens there are more species and hopefully in coming days, I will meet them all.
  

Hooded Crow

Whenever my ship has to enter the black sea from the Mediterranean, we have to transit the Bosporus straits, which is a small water body, which separates Asia from Europe. A sure shot visitor there are a murder of Black Hooded Crows (Corvus cornix ). It was the first time I saw a crow that was not fully black and was such a shocker to me, because since childhood a crow has always been black to me. There are four recognised subspecies of the hooded crow, these are the C. c. pallescens.
The second photograph was a bit difficult because the water in the back ground was reflecting light and the crow was getting underexposed. I spot metered the head of the crow and which gave a shutter speed of about 0.5 sec. I had to boost the ISO to 400 to increase the shutter speed to about 1/100 sec, so I could shoot it hand held. If I had a polarising filter, may be I could have reduced the background glare and get some details off the water too.The polarising filter is very effective in cutting off reflections and reflected light.

This post is dedicated to my best friend Ashwin, who always complained that I never featured a crow on my blog. ( This one's for you mate)