"The Raven's My Brother"

Apparently, though when it comes to this sort of stuff I'm always a little bit sceptical, my name Fee comes from the Irish Gaelic word for Raven. And since I learnt this FACT I've always felt an affinity to that particular bird. Which is partly how it ended up being used in the song I released today called Crossing The Wild Lands.

 Watching birds was an escape for me as a boy. It started with my mum (it would have definitely been my mum) buying me a birthday membership to what was then called The Young Ornithologist Club, or YOC for short. You don't get snappy names like that for kids clubs these days. So in a very amateurish way I started noticing birds. We got Jays in our garden in Birmingham when this started. They were a great bird for a young ornithologist, being a little bit secretive, but quite big and exotic. Seeing them didn't happen all the time, but they have a bright pink plumage which made them striking and fairly easy to see when they did fly through the trees. Like the raven, the jay is a member of the ever so intelligent crow family. Oh, yes, the crows are THE cleverest birds in the world.

 The bird watching was an even more helpful escape when I was a teenager getting bullied. I used to run away from school to the local nature reserve. Better than school in every way at that time. And I'd have romantic daydreams of becoming a Warden on a nature reserve on a Scottish Island. That never happened, but I have ended up living on the west coast of Scotland on the island-like peninsula of Kintyre. And I go for walks and see the ravens who these days are more associated with wild places. There was a time when they were common in cities. And as in my song, the raven does "fly like a dancer who has learnt to forget that gravity rules us". They can fly upside down, and they do a lot of that sort of thing when they are courting their partners. The show offs.

 But not everybody likes ravens. Turns out that rural farmers hate them because they are thought to attack newly born lambs and do nasty stuff like, pluck the little lambs eyes out. Nice. I don't know if that actually happens, but nature is not a polite environment, so it could well do. I'm still proud to call the raven my brother though. I hope we do meet up one day. Preferably when I've learned to fly upside down as well.