The odds of a white raven being born are one in 30,000. Despite those improbabilities, a blue-eyed white raven first appeared in the Spenard neighborhood of Anchorage last October, where it became an instant media sensation.
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The bird was last seen in April. Biologists say it left with its family to return to the wilderness, where ravens nest and raise their young.
Scientists, who have tracked the birds, say they usually migrate back to town in the late fall, where there are plenty of pizza crusts and French fry droppings to tide them over through the winter.
There’s no guarantee the white bird will be back. But a plaintive question seems to haunt Spenard: Oh, white raven, white raven. Wherefore art thou?
A raven by any other color would be just as full of mischief. But when the white raven first appeared around this time last year, it stole the hearts of people like Jennifer Olson.
“With my limited cellphone storage space,” she said. “I managed to amass about 6,500 photos.”
Olson said it’s hard to delete a single one.
“Because each moment is different,” she said. “Each little look of the eye. A little tilt of the head. A turn of the beak, or a moment with another bird. The background. It’s endless.”
Olson is ever hopeful that more photographs are on the wing. She’s excited that the pace of raven migration into Anchorage has started to pick up. They usually begin to arrive when the seagulls depart.
For the past week, Olson has gotten up early to visit some of the white raven’s favorite spots. She said the birds overnight in rookeries on the hillsides, and the raven’s flock usually shows up at the Anchorage Wastewater and Utilities office, first thing in the morning.
“There’s a bunch of trees right around that building. They would pit stop there, and then they would fly into the Spenard area,” Olson said. “So often the white raven would, of course, be in a group with all the other ravens, family and friends I imagine.”
Olson is one of those who refers to the raven as a “she,” but nobody knows for sure what the sex of the bird is, until it’s time to observe the raven’s courtship rituals. Males usually put on elaborate aerobatics displays to impress the females. But ravens don’t normally mate until they are at least two years old.
Greg Messimer, a Kenai cab driver and nature photographer, first spotted a white raven hatchling outside of Soldotna in 2023. Messimer said ravens were nesting in the area this summer, but the white bird was not among them.
It’s possible the white raven and its family have moved on to a new location.
But Jennifer Olson is hoping they’ll have fond memories of the tater tots and bread crusts they found discarded at the Spenard Roadhouse, where she got some of her best pictures.
She’s been there too. But alas, so far, no white raven. The very first photo posted on the Anchorage White Raven Spottings Facebook page was on Oct. 24 last year.
But Aaron Towarak may have been the first to photograph the bird in Anchorage. On Oct. 20, 2023, he took a picture of the white raven and its black-feathered companion on the roof of the old La Mex restaurant on Spenard Road.
“In some ways it has its own mysticism,” said Towarak, who remembers the moment well.
He was living in a Spenard hotel room, waiting to get into an alcohol treatment program.
“And I was just trying to stay active, because I was going through alcohol withdrawal,” Towarak said. “So, I was walking around on Spenard. And that’s kind of when I saw it. It’s a good place marker for my personal journey.”
He said the sight of the bird filled him with inspiration — and three days later, he entered a treatment program in Juneau. Last week, he celebrated one year of sobriety.
Towarak is from Unalakleet, where he and other Inupiaq boys learned to make raven calls. He is familiar with Native stories about how a white raven would one day appear as a messenger of hope to the world.
Towarak said things would come full circle for him to see the white raven again. He’d like to know how the bird is doing.
“You kind of wonder where they are, where they go off to, what they do,” he said. “But then you just realize we don’t have control over nature or maybe even ourselves at times.”
Towarak said that’s one of the big lessons of sobriety, to learn to acceptance.
“A lot of times we want to impose our will on the world, but it’s kind of about letting go of things in your life that you don’t have control over,” he said.
But Towarak has regained control of a lot. He spends a lot of time with his children. After treatment, he landed a good job at an environmental engineering firm, where he has since been promoted. When he started work, he had to get around on a bicycle, but last week he bought a new car.
This weekend saw a flurry of activity on the Anchorage White Raven Spottings page. There was a possible sighting at the Fred Meyer store parking lot on Dimond Boulevard. But fellow posters questioned whether it might have been a seagull, since those birds haven’t completely left town on their fall migration. There was also a row of ravens with white bird sitting on a light pole in Muldoon, but that bird apparently turned out to be a pigeon. So far, there have been no pictures to verify any of these sightings.
Rick Sinnott, a retired Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist, has worked on raven tagging studies. He said ravens that winter in Anchorage travel as far afield as the North Slope, Fairbanks and Juneau — but it’s very likely the white raven could return to Anchorage — and if that’s the case, this should happen in the next two weeks. If not, Sinnott said, the raven has either moved to a new area — or is no longer alive. He warns that young ravens are prone to mishaps, and many do not survive their early years.
As for Jennifer Olson, who makes the rounds every day in search of the raven, her sense of anticipation is almost palpable. Along with other photographers, she’s been posting her favorite photos from last winter on the White Raven Facebook page.
“I can’t wait. And if the white raven does return, which I hope it does,” Olson said, “I look forward to amassing thousands more photos.”
Olson said she also looks forward to the friendship and camaraderie she enjoyed with other photographers. She believes the bird seemed to remember some of its paparazzi and enjoyed their attention.
“I just loved the personality of the raven,” said Olson, as she craned her neck to the sky, to watch a black raven riding the air currents overhead. “Wouldn’t it be great if the white raven showed up right now?”
“I hope that the bird recognized me as somebody who really enjoyed being in its presence.”
