The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London. Christopher Skaife

not out of politeness. I don’t know if you’ve tossed many rats to a raven, or if you’ve ever had to clear up yesterday’s mauled meat leftovers, but from my experience you really don’t want to be doing so while digesting an early-morning bacon sandwich. Trust me, it’s best to go with a bowl of porridge once the job is over and done with.)

      To be honest, I’d probably prefer if the birds were all vegetarian, but ravens, like a lot of us humans, are meat-eaters. There’s a theory that we Yeoman Warders got the nickname Beefeaters because as members of the royal bodyguard we were permitted to eat as much beef as we could from the king’s table. There are plenty of other theories about the origin of the nickname, but whether any of them are conclusive evidence I don’t know. Frankly, we all prefer to be called Yeoman Warders anyway.

      Given a choice, I fancy that many of the ravens, like many of us, would probably survive on junk food. Merlina in particular is very partial to a crisp – or as Americans like to call it, a potato chip. She watches out for any little crisp that a young visitor might drop, and she’ll take it to one of the water bowls and give it a good rinse, softening it up for consumption. She has a particular ability to be able to spot a tube of Pringles from the other side of Tower Green, hop right up to an innocent member of the public, steal the whole tube, hop off with it, pop off the lid, and cram as many crisps into her mouth as she possibly can before being noticed. This is worth bearing in mind if you’re thinking of visiting the Tower and bringing a snack with you. Remember: ravens are opportunists, and will happily steal anything from you if and when the chance arises.

      I have spent almost as many years now standing at my post on Tower Green watching the ravens getting into scrapes as I spent getting into scrapes myself in the army, and I can safely say that to watch a raven at work scavenging food is to witness something very much like a military operation. As a soldier you’re taught all sorts of drills and standard operating procedures to prepare for battle and to analyse your options when engaged on a mission. In military terms this is how we might describe one of Merlina’s typical sandwich-snatch operations:

      MISSION: To steal a ham sandwich from a visitor sitting on a bench.

      PLAN OF ATTACK: Sneak up from the rear with stealth and cunning, hide under the bench until the target puts down the sandwich, then remove the prize by pulling at it through the bench slats until in full possession. Then hop off.

      ACTIONS ON: If detected on the approach to the bench, look innocent and peck at the ground.

      ACTIONS ON: If member of the public isn’t putting the sandwich down, jump on the bench and scare them until they drop it.

      ACTIONS ON: If unable to tug the sandwich through the bench slat, pull harder and store as much as you can in your mouth at the same time.

      RE-ORG: Hop to the Ravenmaster for protection while you’re being chased by the angry visitor.

      Whatever their personal snacking habits, I always feed the ravens twice a day in the enclosure, once in the morning and then sometime in the afternoon. Feeding them in the enclosure allows me to monitor what they’re eating. In the past the Ravenmasters preferred to put the food out around the Tower, but the problem was that a seagull might take a nice juicy piece of ox liver, say, that was intended for a raven, have a little nibble on it, and then casually drop it on a visitor from a great height. I’ve seen it happen more than once, and believe me, it is not a pretty sight. These days the ravens have come to expect to find food in the enclosure, and because they know they’re going to be fed safely there, they’re happy to roam around all day. It also encourages them to go back to the enclosure as the light fades. It’s a win-win.

      In preparing the food, it’s important of course that we follow basic health and safety requirements. I am an absolute stickler for proper hand-washing procedures. Plus, I like the smell of all the antiseptic stuff. I can remember when I’d just started work at the Tower and the old Ravenmaster, Derrick Coyle, would walk into our guardroom, the Yeoman Warders’ Hall, and I could smell the antiseptic on him. It always reminded me of my childhood. The smell of my mum scrubbing up in the hairdressing salon where she worked, the smell of a day having been properly completed, or just begun. The smell of cleanliness, of preparedness, of a job well done.

      Once I’ve distributed the food to the birds I leave them in the enclosure for an hour or so before letting them out. The great thing about ravens – unlike, say, us humans – is that they’ll only eat until they’ve had enough, and then they like to go off and exercise. Anything they don’t use they’ll cache.

      And speaking of caching, the next thing I do every morning is take care of the foxes.

      If there’s one thing I’ve learned in a life dealing with animals, it’s this: there are always foxes to be taken care of.

      8

       The Menagerie

      As Ravenmaster, I see myself as responsible for all the wildlife in the Tower – including the foxes. What I’ve tried to do here over the years is to create a balance between everyone’s competing needs: the ravens, the foxes, the Yeoman Warders, the visitors. We all share the environment of the Tower, and my job is really about finding ways to enable us to live in harmony together. Most of the time all it requires is a little bit of forethought and some careful husbandry. If you leave food lying around, for example – guess what? – the foxes come in where you don’t want them, and they can cause absolute havoc. In the old days we’d just catch and cage them and take them away for extermination, but my feeling is that they have almost as much right to be here as the rest of us.

      In order to maintain our modest little ecosystem, every morning after I’ve fed the ravens I take any scraps of food to the fox cache. A cache is a hiding place for ammunition, food, or indeed treasure of any sort. In the army we were taught to set up caches in evasion and recovery operations, storing food and water, medical items, communication equipment, that sort of thing. I decided to set up the fox cache a few years ago when I realised that the best way to manage the foxes in the Tower was to try to think like a fox. It’s that old military thing: know your enemy. With foxes you have to understand that they really just want to come and fill their bellies, and then they’re happy, and they’ll leave you alone. So I found a special place where I can deliver food to them every day, which keeps them contented and well away from the ravens’ enclosure. Job done.

      (And how did I know the best place to leave the food for the foxes, you might ask. Well, I probably know every nook and cranny in the Tower, every rooftop and gutter, every walkway, every staircase, every little crack and fissure. Wherever it is, however high or low, however inaccessible, I’ve been there, found the ravens hiding there, found something they’ve hidden there, or found a foxhole or a nest or a den or a warren. Visitors are always asking about hidden tunnels in the Tower. All I can say is that I’ve never discovered any – and I’ve been looking for years.)

      The Tower throughout its history has always been full of all sorts of animals. These days a lot of those animals are the cats and dogs and other pets of the Yeoman Warders – you’d be surprised how many of us are out early in the morning walking our dogs in the moat. Apart from the ravens and the foxes there are also the various squirrels, seagulls, pigeons, sparrows, starlings, kestrels, blue tits, crows, mice, rats, and even the odd pair of Egyptian geese that like to stop over and drink from the ravens’ water bowls. The Tower is an eighteen-acre green oasis in the middle of London, after all. We have a breeding pair of kestrels in one of the arrow slits opposite my house in the Casemates, who have been resident now for many years; we have four different kinds of bats; and every year when Traitors’ Gate is full of water we usually get a duck family settling in with their ducklings. Two magpies, who I call Ronnie and Reggie Kray after the notorious 1960s London gangsters, like to visit the ravens’ enclosure looking for scraps of leftover meat, and seem to have been accepted by them – perhaps on the threat of violence, who knows.

      Until relatively recently, though, most of the animals in the Tower would have been the exotic beasts