I live about two hours away from LIGO Hanford. Most people in this area aren’t even aware of the installation. I probably wouldn’t be, if a close relative hadn’t told me about a guided tour she was given several years back by a scientist who works there. It wasn’t operational at the time because of an equipment upgrade of some kind. She isn’t at all science-y, and wasn’t too sure what LIGO was supposed to be doing, but said lasers were involved, and really long, cement tunnels half-buried in the scrub, out in the middle of nowhere.

Last year there was an article in our local paper reporting that there had been irregularities in the Hanford data nearly every afternoon for a while during the previous summer. The blips seemed to correspond with sounds recorded on a microphone installed onsite. (Anything but an extremely quiet environment drowns out signals the detector looks for.) Listening to the recordings, the physicist in charge of finding and eliminating the source of errant noise almost immediately said the sounds reminded him of birds pecking at something.

He’d seen ravens in the area. He discovered that they were hanging out on metal pipes carrying super-cold nitrogen into the tunnels, scraping together little heaps of frost from the pipes with their beaks and eating it like a Dairy Queen treat. His team insulated the pipes, and the ravens found somewhere else to go for refreshments.