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

7

Biscuits and Blood

I like to keep the storeroom neat and tidy at all times, the result no doubt of a lifetime in the military. When you join the army as a young recruit you’re taught everything, and I mean everything. You learn how to clean your teeth and how to make your bed and tie your boots, how to iron and fold your clothes. Above all, you’re taught never to just leave stuff lying around. It’s drilled into you. You survive by following routines and procedures. A place for everything and everything in its place. No excuses.

So, in the storeroom there’s the fridge, the freezer, the sink and the counter tops, all kept spick and span. Raven calendar on the wall, obviously, and our daily diary underneath it, so the whole team can keep up to date and log what’s happening with the birds. There’s the fishing net on its shelf, used for raven-catching purposes, if a bird is injured and needs immediate veterinary attention. Chasing a raven around the Tower in full view of the public, fishing net in hand, like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – believe me, that really is an experience. The first-aid kit: you certainly know if you’ve had a nip from a raven. Scales for weighing the birds, which we do once a month. Chopping boards and equipment for preparing the meals. Rubber gloves. Leather falconry gloves. Metal gauntlets – which I do not recommend for handling the ravens, because they do sometimes like to try to crush your fingers, and picking metal out of flesh is never nice, as I can testify. A couple of wooden boxes to carry sick birds to the vets we work with at London Zoo. There’s also an old plastic KerPlunk, which we like to use for the ravens’ entertainment. (In KerPlunk: The Raven Edition, the challenge for the birds is to remove the straws in order to win a dead mouse which we place in the tube, ready to fall down and be eaten. Good clean raven fun. Munin is the reigning champion.) I also keep a jar full of raven feathers in the storeroom, kindly donated by the ravens once a year during their moult, and which I occasionally like to distribute to deserving/well-behaved/lucky visitors. If I’m doing a Tower tour, for example, and I discover that a couple are recently married or engaged, I like to give them a pair of feathers – a primary and a secondary, since without one the other is no good. I’m an old romantic at heart. Sometimes people request feathers for use as quills, or for medicinal purposes, or for musical instruments, though exactly which musical instruments or for what medicinal purposes I’m not entirely sure, or indeed whether raven feathers make particularly good quills.

As the Ravenmaster you get used to fielding all sorts of bizarre requests and questions from the public. No, you cannot buy the birds. No, you cannot sponsor them. And no, you cannot borrow them. They belong to the Tower – or the Tower belongs to them. In case you’re interested, here are the top five questions that people tend to ask us Yeoman Warders, and the sort of answers we like to give:

1. ‘Where’s the bathroom?’

Usually asked by our American visitors, who – may I say – are unfailingly charming and polite. Alas, in British English we tend to rather crudely refer to what Americans call the bathroom as the ‘toilet’, and to us a bathroom is the place you go to have a bath, so we tend to reply, ‘Why, sir, do you need a bath?’

2. ‘Where are the instruments of torture?’

Answers to this one vary from Yeoman Warder to Yeoman Warder, but they tend to go along the lines of ‘Try working here every day and you’ll soon find out.’

3. ‘Where was Anne Boleyn executed?’

This one demands the obvious answer, ‘Somewhere around the neck area, sir.’

4. ‘Have you ever seen a ghost?’

Some Yeoman Warders like to use this question as a prompt to tell the classic tales about the boy princes, the headless apparitions, Sir Walter Raleigh on the battlements, and all the other chain-rattling Victorian nonsense. My preferred response tends to be something like, ‘No, sir, but we certainly keep plenty of spirits in our clubhouse.’

5. ‘Who built the Tower?’

The Tower was built over the course of several centuries (though the medieval defences are essentially unchanged), so this question can elicit all sorts of responses, ranging from the patriotic ‘As well to ask, sir, who built the spirit of the Great British people!’ to ‘Well, we haven’t quite finished it yet, but we’re getting there,’ to a fully comprehensive explanation of the major enlargements and extensions to the building undertaken by Edward III and Richard II during the fourteenth century, to the confusing but accurate ‘1075/1078/1080, depending on which historical sources you consult.’ I prefer to explain that the Tower was founded by William the Conqueror and that the building of the great White Tower in stone was probably supervised by the Bishop of Rochester, Gundulf of Bec, who is not to be confused with Gandalf the Grey.

To be honest, the answers all rather depend on what day of the week it is, but basically, if you keep setting ’em up, we’ll keep knocking ’em down.

Anyway, as I was saying, that’s basically the storeroom. Except, of course, for the dog biscuits. Bag upon bag upon row upon row of dog biscuits, all neatly lined up on the shelves. When people ask if they can come and see the ravens, or if there’s a group who want to come and talk to me about them, I have one simple request and requirement: that they bring with them a bag of dog biscuits. This is absolutely non-negotiable. I like to think that our ravens have the best diet of any birds in the world, a proper varied diet which keeps them strong and healthy. But everyone deserves a treat now and then, and the ravens love a nice dog biscuit soaked in blood. To prepare biscuits in blood, you simply place the dog biscuits into a container filled with blood and leave to soak for at least an hour – the longer the better. Et voilà! Bon appétit!

Rats are also a bit of a treat for the birds. I buy them in bulk from a specialist supplier and store them in the freezer. Then I get out as many as I need the night before, defrost them in the fridge, and prepare them in the morning. A nice fat rat’ll do a raven all day. A raven’s preferred method of engagement with a dead rat, or indeed with a live mouse if they get hold of one, is perfectly straightforward: foot on, claws in, beak engaged, guts first, then the rest stripped bare, leaving just the skin. All that usually remains is what looks like a mini rat-skin rug, which I like to bag up for the Tower foxes so there’s no waste.

A raven’s formidable claw. (Courtesy of the author)

The ravens get through about a ton and a half of food a year. Their diet mostly consists of chicken, lamb and pig hearts, liver, kidney, mice, rats, day-old chicks, peanuts in their shells, the occasional boiled egg, and some fish, steak chunks and rabbit (with the fur left on). Anything else they want, they steal from the bins and from the public, or they just go out and kill it. Most of the meat I get from Smithfield Market. If you’ve never been to Smithfield Market, you should go before it’s too late. It’s one of the great old London institutions, a proper wholesale market, but also open to the public, and always under threat of being re-developed and turned into swanky offices and fancy restaurants. Smithfield is not for the faint-hearted. I was a regular for about a year before any of the traders deigned to actually give me a nod, never mind speak to me. You can get amazing bargains, though only if you’re there by about 5 a.m. at the latest, and you’re prepared to buy in bulk. Whatever you do, don’t ask for a single lamb chop. Tell the lads there that I sent you. They’ll probably tell you where to go, but nonetheless, it’s a start. And once you’re there you might as well nip into the Hope for a pint, or La Forchetta for a cup of tea and a fry-up.

(Personally, I don’t like to eat until I’ve fed the ravens in the morning. This is 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 presented by the rulers of faraway lands to the kings and queens of England. For more than six hundred years the Tower was a sort of zoo, or at least a storehouse for rare creatures of all kinds, which were an entertainment and a spectacle for visitors. In a sense, the ravens are another chapter in the great Royal Menagerie story, and the Ravenmaster is a keeper of one of the world’s few single-species open-air zoos.

The term menagerie – which I like to use to refer to all of us who live and work together in the Tower – derives from the French, and refers to an aristocratic or royal collection of captive animals. As every schoolchild knows, when William the Conqueror invaded in 1066 he ordered that a series of fortresses be built around England to protect his barons from the threat of invading armies and civil dissent – among which fortresses the Tower is only the most famous and the most long-standing. According to the Domesday Book, the Normans founded nearly fifty castles in the twenty years after landing at Hastings, a building programme unprecedented in English history, and which makes even the current property boom in London seem not so much a bang as a whimper. What’s perhaps less well-known is that William’s son Henry established England’s first menagerie at his manor house in Oxford, building a big wall to contain his collection of lions, camels and porcupines. This small royal zoo was eventually moved to the Tower around 1204, during the reign of King John, and formed the beginning of the Royal Menagerie.

There have always been famous animals who have called London home. When I was growing up it was the giant pandas Chi Chi and Ching-Ching and Guy the gorilla at London Zoo. Earlier in the twentieth century there was Winnie, the female Canadian black bear who would give her name to young Christopher Robin Milne’s teddy bear, the inspiration for Winnie-the-Pooh. And back in the nineteenth century there was the mighty Obaysch, the first hippo in Europe since the days of the Roman Empire, who caused a sensation: Queen Victoria came to watch him swimming in Regent’s Park, and compared him to a porpoise. But before all of them there were the animals of the Tower, the bigger and stranger the better.