Some Alaska Costco shoppers say their groceries were stolen by ravens in the store’s parking lot
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Some Alaska Costco shoppers said their groceries were stolen by ravens in the store’s parking lot.
Matt Lewallen said he was putting his groceries in his car in an Anchorage Costco parking lot when ravens came in to steal a short rib from his cart, the Anchorage Daily News reported Friday.
“I literally took 10 steps and turned around, two ravens came down and immediately took one out of the package, ripped it off and flew with it,” Lewallen said.
Lewallen said the piece of meat was about 4 by 7 inches (10 by 18 centimeters) – a hefty meal for a hefty bird.
‘They know what they are doing; it’s not their first time, ”Lewallen said. “They’re very thick, so I think they have a whole system there.”
And once he got home, he found that one of the ravens had poked another rib but hadn’t robbed him.
“I cut that meat out and started marinating it and my wife said, ‘That’s dirty, we have to take it back,’” Lewallen said. “Costco even took it back after we started marinating it and gave us a full refund.”
Additional sightings of raven thieves have appeared on social media.
“My parents took care of their business after a shop and came home with one less steak!” Kimberly Waller wrote on Facebook. “The bird snatched it straight from the backpack in the parking lot.”
Anchorage resident Tamara Josey replied to Waller’s post, calling the ravens “calculating.” She said ravens floated her in an attempt to steal her groceries.
“I had two ravens, one sitting next to me in the car and it kept screaming really loud,” Josey said. He sat on the car and stared at me, then he skipped next to the cargo bed on the other side, and he just kept going back and forth. The other raven was on the ground. He kept trying to pull – I had those little mini melons you have in the net bags – he kept trying to get the mesh and pull my melons off the cart. “
A raven began to circle around Josey until she got them to shoot away.
“He was waiting for another opportunity to get the melons off the cart, but they were never deterred,” she said. “They just stayed in the mail, waiting for their next opportunity to steal something from my cart.”
“They are very committed to their mission,” she added.
A manager at an Anchorage Costco declined to comment on the newspaper about the raven thieves.
The Anchorage Audubon Society counts the raven population every December. The group reported 923 common ravens in 2018, 621 in 2019 and 750 birds in 2020.
Rick Sinnott, a former wildlife biologist with the State Department of Fish and Game, said hundreds of ravens fly to Anchorage in the winter for food. After winter turns to spring, most ravens leave, Sinnott said.
But before they do, the ravens hang around picking all kinds of meats, fruits, and vegetables.
“For decades, for decades, they’ve watched people in supermarket parking lots with all this food,” Sinnott said. “They know what a piece of fruit looks like in a shopping cart because they have seen it on the floor or seen it in a trash can.”