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Check out the most recent The Resilient Animal podcast episode
Autumn Crows and Ravens
This episode of The Resilient Animal podcast, explores why crows and ravens feel especially powerful in autumn, when their louder calls and massive communal roosts can seem like eerie “councils” during a season linked to harvest and the thinning veil between worlds. Tracing symbolism across cultures, it examines Odin’s ravens Huginn and Muninn as thought and memory amid winter preparation, The Morrigan and Samhain in Celtic tradition, Bran the Blessed and the Tower of London legend, and Native American stories that portray raven as creator and boundary-crosser. It contrasts these with darker European associations tied to scavenging, battlefields, plague, and the scarecrow, and highlights Poe’s “The Raven” as an autumnal mirror of grief. The script also details corvid intelligence and fall behavior—caching, tool use, face recognition, play—then connects modern shifts like climate change, urban adaptation, and evolving cultural portrayals to a renewed view of these birds as resilient communities preparing for the dark months.