I work in San Francisco on Market Street. Yesterday I watched a furball taking place over the center of Market Street at 200 ft that almost got me killed.
I was leaving the bulding to catch BART home when I looked up to see 2 ravens and 2 seagulls furballing in the best MA tactical form. It was wingmen covering their leaders and the best virtical manuvers I've seen outside of Leviathen.
The 4 of them would go into a climbing circle on a 20mph breeze between the buildings. They would keep separation, the ravens in formation behind the seagulls in formation. When a gust would hit the seagulls would rocket vertical which would cause the ravens to follow.
At the top of the zoom the ravens would just be catching up when one gull would break right pulling one raven off, while the leader would be stalling just long enough for the other raven to pull up under him and the gull would flair, stop cold and the raven would face first into the gulls feet catching gull claws.
Then the gull would dive away picking up speed into another turn. But at this point the raven would close his wings, dive away faster, turn under and inside of the gull on his low 6, flip over as he passed and rake the gull from underneth, then dive away and zoom up again.
At this point the two wingmen would pull around and repeat the same performance while the two that just engaged circled and climbed back to about 200ft. I watched about 4 repeats of this with variations in the horizontal with low and high yoyo's by the ravens who were faster flapping their wings for short distances. So the gulls with longer wings always pulled the fight into the vertical on the next wind gust.
Sometimes a gull would misjudge his rope and stall out and the raven would run into him with both locking claws and tumbling for about 50ft before letting go and diving away to gain alt and coming back. But ther were always 2 engaged while the other 2 were regaining engagment alt.
After some time watching this, it occured to me I was standing in the middle of traffic, a truck had just slammed on it's breaks to stop a foot from my back and drivers were yelling obsenities from their cars. I'd zoned out watching a furball over San Francisco.....
