<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Jennifer Olson captured almost all of her white raven photos last year on her cell phone. (Courtesy Jennifer Olson)</figcaption></figure>



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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.

RELATED: Anchorage’s white raven becomes a local legend as a tracked trickster

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.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Jennifer Olson captured some of her best white raven photos on this dumpster behind the Spenard Roadhouse restaurant. (Courtesy Jennifer Olson)</figcaption></figure>

“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.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Some worried that the white raven would get picked on by other ravens, because it was different. But the white raven seemed to hold its own and appeared to have many friendships with fellow ravens. (Courtesy Jennifer Olson)</figcaption></figure>

“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.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Aaron Towarak took this photograph of the white raven and its black-feathered companion on Oct. 20, 2023. He spotted it on the roof of the old La Mex Restaurant on Spenard Road. It may be one of the first photographs of the bird taken when it first appeared in Spenard. Towarak thought it was a seagull until he heard the bird caw. (Courtesy Aaron Towarak)</figcaption></figure>

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 lettin