The Ravens and Saint Cuthbert

This is a detail from a sample illustration sent to my publisher by Heather Hayward, before she was chosen to illustrate my children's picture book, The Ravens of Farne.  I think it's quite beautiful!

The final illustration in the picture book, though, shows the raven bringing the piece of lard to St. Cuthbert in its beak, not its claws. Heather, my editor Jane Meyer and I all worked hard to make sure the details were accurate. We wanted the ravens to look natural, but have just a touch of anthropomorphism, humour and character that would suit the narrative given by Bede in his  Life of St. Cuthbert. In the story, Cuthbert relates how ravens stole straw from the roof of the guest house of St. Cuthbert's island hermitage. The saint scolded the birds, who returned next day with a gift of lard, laying it at his feet.

In the course of my raven research, I of course turned to the work of the foremost expert in the field, Bernd Heinrich, author of The Mind of the Raven. This interesting quote about this noted researcher appears at the PBS site:


from pbs.org Raven site:

"Heinrich ... flushed a bird off a frozen chunk of suet and observed upon inspection that the raven used its beak to carve a precise groove around the fat, allowing it to carry off a large chunk at once instead of several small morsels to eat one at a time. Heinrich commented that “the raven not only had thought ahead, but also had acted on that thought and shown intelligence.”

Preliminary sketch of St. Cuthbert & Raven by illustrator Heather Hayward.