Hey Dylan. Hello. How are you, Ella? I'm doing well. How are you? I'm doing good. You know,

it's summer. Kids are home. It's like a little chaotic around here, but like all is well. All is good.

That's good to hear. I want to take you back to a less pleasant time. January of 2021, this was

deep COVID. In England, it was yet another damp gray winter. They'd gone through Brexit. They had entered their third national COVID lockdown. And this is the moment when the Tower of London, sensing that the world needed more bad news, announced that Merlina the Raven had gone missing.

Does that mean anything to you?

Not Merlina.

Not really.

I'm guessing it has, this is like a national bird of some sort, but no, no, I don't know what this is.

Okay, Merlina is a very important bird. She's actually part of a group of ravens that live in the Tower of London, which, by the way, is more of a palace or a fortress than a tower.

Anyway, these ravens, they didn't just fly onto the grounds. It's actually an elite group that was purposely brought to the tower and cared for by a professional raven master.

Yes, I've seen one of these raven masters and the ravens.

They're like these personable, charismatic British birds.

Like, people know about them.

They're excited about them.

So Merlina is one of these ravens, and she was very, yeah, very entertaining. Apparently she would imitate crow calls.

They think to get crows to come down and play with her. She also had this habit of playing dead

in front of tourists, so she'd flop over on her back and pretend to be, which could

actually be a stress response, but people thought this was hilarious. She was also a very soulful

raven. So she was at one point bonded to another female raven. And apparently when that

raven died, Marlina would not leave her side. They took the body away, and Merlina stood on the north

wall of the tower, just not moving silent for three days. Her well ran deep. Yeah, very stoic

Raven behavior, like appropriately moody and broody. Okay, so this Merlina then went missing, like in the middle of COVID.

...