Mary Ellen Talmage 2011. Raving about Ravens. Melbourne, Victorian Ornithological Research Group. 168 pp.

Field studies of Little Raven (at Albert Park) and Forest Raven (Otways). Interesting narrative and summary of breeding feeding etc and especially behaviour. Much of the Little Raven work was done before Albert Park Lake Reserve was “redeveloped” in 1994 for the grand prix circuit - the author manages to stay non-judgemental but I hadn’t realised over 1,000 trees were destroyed during for that purpose. And that bird diversity and sightings have of course dropped significantly since. Mary Ellen Talmage is an occupational therapist specialising in patients with brain damage. Observing behaviour of intelligent ravens is a natural pairing. Summaries and data presented suffer from some biases, for example the food preferences (in an urban park setting) are not accompanied by estimates of relative abundances of those items in the environment. But that is an unfair criticism in a book like this which is otherwise very interesting and informative.