Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (29 page)

The four tame ravens eagerly fed on inch-long, yellow-orange cheese puffs. Whenever I brought this factory food and scattered it over the ground, there was a great rush among the four to be the first to gobble it. Those individual puffs that were not eaten right away were cached for later use. Every single cheese puff I ever left was either eaten immediately or cached. One day, I dumped a whole bagful. Did they all rush in? No way. They showed alarm. After a while, the bolder among them cautiously edged closer and picked up a piece that was several inches removed from the pile. The pile itself was left inviolate. I did not feed
them anything else, and they begged piteously. Saliva was dripping from their bills—they could almost “taste” those cheese puffs. I listened to their constant begging cries for five long hours before I finally took pity on them (or on myself). As I spread the pile, they rushed in and took every one. The second time I offered piles of spaghetti or cheese puffs, there were no problems; they went right to them.

The piece-versus-pile experiment was easy to do, so I repeated it three more times with similar results, once with dog food, once with freshwater clams, and once with cornflakes. I had thought that after a while their irrational fear of a pile of food might wane, but it didn’t. They remained cautious. Each
kind
of pile was evaluated separately.

On November 14, 1993, I dropped a raven wing primary feather into the aviary. That stirred up quite a commotion in the eight-month-old birds. All, especially Fuzz, made deep, long, rasping alarm calls. They flew all around the feather, both curious and fearful. They stared at it, flew down to the ground near it, then flew up again to a high perch. Although Lefty and Houdi soon lost interest, Fuzz and Goliath persisted in making alarm calls. After about ten minutes, Goliath finally grabbed the feather, manipulated it with his bill for thirty seconds, then dropped it. After that, neither he nor any of the others ever gave the black feather a second glance.

By mid-January 1994, the ravens had broken off all the twigs and peeled most of the bark from the branches and trunk of a six-inch-thick pine tree in the aviary. Thinking they might now be ready to debark and delimb a new tree, I brought in another, smaller pine tree. Instead of tackling it, they all hid in their shed and stayed holed up there for one and a half days, without once coming down to feed. Nevertheless, when they did finally come out of seclusion, they seemed hellbent on the tree’s destruction.

P
HANTOM
M
OVEMENTS

Fuzz and the others had instantly pursued live prey. They had chased chipmunks and caught mice, shrews, and birds that entered their half-acre aviary through the wire mesh. They were hunters. Knowing this,
I brought a dead short-tailed shrew,
Blarina brevicauda
(a favorite and common snack of theirs, and an unusual mammal that has a poisonous bite), tied it onto a long white thread, and threw the shrew out onto the snow, while holding an end of the thread that I hoped would not be visible to them because of the snow. As I had expected, they all raced after the shrew. Goliath snapped it up first and flew off with it. I gave the thread a tug after he had gone ten to fifteen feet. Feeling the shrew tug in his bill, he dropped it instantly, landed, and watched it from a respectful distance as it lay on the snow. Something was not quite right here. The others seemed to know it, too. They all retreated from this shrew as though it were some frightful apparition.

Hoping to entice them to grab it again, I dragged it slowly over the snow, as one might drag a bass lure through the water with monofilament line. They still stayed away. Was I too close? Did they think I was the cause of the unexplained behavior of this weird shrew? To try to put them at ease, I walked fifteen yards away from the shrew, keeping the end of the spool of white thread in my pocket. Still no takers. As I walked near them holding the spool of thread in my hand, they even flew away from me. After about five minutes, Houdi hopped down to the snow, cautiously walked to the shrew, picked it up, and dropped it instantly and flew off. She did not come back. I rolled up the thread, untied the shrew, and tossed it back onto the snow. Houdi then immediately flew back to it, picked it up, tore it in half, and greedily swallowed the two chunks.

Wondering if they had been afraid of me with the spool of thread because the spool was new to them, I tried other new things. I dropped a nickel onto the snow. All came to me instantly as though nothing had happened, and Lefty was the first to grab the nickel. For added enticement, or as an added control for my experiment, I pulled out my keychain with four keys on it and jingled it in front of them. They had never seen keys or keychains before, and they all crowded close to me to try to get these toys. I did not relinquish my keys to them, but having lured them close, I next pulled the roll of white thread out of my pocket. Bedlam! They all flew off in alarm. When I unrolled the thread and laid it across the snow, they were not afraid in
the least. Apparently they had associated the new thing, the spool, with the phantom movements of the shrew, which they did not understand and that frightened them.

To further examine fear of phantom movements, I tied a string to a stick that contacted a horizontal perch in the aviary being used by Fuzz, Goliath, Houdi, and Whitefeather. Similar string was already supporting the plastic netting of part of their aviary, so the ravens were used to it and were not alarmed by it. I threaded the string from the stick in their aviary to my desk in front of a window. From the house, I then caused the stick and perch to jiggle on a wind-still day. Their response was dramatic: They jumped up as if electroshocked, even when perched several yards from the jiggled and unused perch. After jumping up, rapidly twisting their heads and looking in all directions, all four birds retreated into their shed. I tried the stick-wiggle test four times, and each time they panicked. In contrast, when I went into the aviary and jiggled the string and the stick or the perch directly with my hand, they showed no visible reaction whatsoever. Similarly, I can make all sorts of noise in the aviary. When they can see me, they are unperturbed. If I do even a little banging around in the nearby woodshed where they can’t see me, I can hear them flying around in apparent panic.

A raven is afraid of what it knows to be dangerous, but that seems to be the least of its fears. Most of all, it is afraid of events that violate its expectations. Perhaps, like us, they fear what they do not understand. If they can fear the unknown, then that implies that they know. Aside from drawing that inference, I was no closer to answering my original question of why ravens fear carcasses, yet can be so bold as to court danger by pulling eagles’ and wolves’ tails, riding on the backs of boars (Dathe, 1964; Steinbacher, 1964) and bison (D. Stahler, personal communication) or pulling fur for upholstering their nest from a donkey at pasture at Bill Chester’s farm in Tunbridge, Vermont.

T
HE WELL-GROOMED YOUNG MAN
sitting next to me on the plane to Bozeman, Montana, identified himself as a used car salesman from Memphis, Tennessee. He’d been reading a Bible before he introduced himself, and he told me he was traveling with a group of other Tennesseans to a convention in Bozeman “to learn how to talk to people to save them so that they can go to heaven.”

He asked me what I did. “Study ravens,” I told him. The conversation lagged.

“How does one get to heaven?” I asked.

“By believing in the Lord Jesus Christ.” And he added, “Do
you
believe?”

“I don’t believe, I
know
,” I told him. “I’m going to heaven right now—to Yellowstone National Park to see ravens with wolves.”

As soon as we landed in Bozeman, my wife Rachel and I rented a car and drove to Gardiner, at the north entrance to Yellowstone, to check into our motel. I’d never before checked into a motel with blood all over its parking lot. Next to our new white rented Nissan were several pickup trucks and campers carrying gutted elk carcasses. There were also four trucks from the Montana Department of Livestock, with men wearing wide hats and toting long rifles. They were the state’s hired guns, here to kill bison from the park. Inside our motel room, next to the cellophane-wrapped plastic glasses, were a few bits of rags with a prominent sign saying:
THESE RAGS ARE FOR YOUR USE. TO CLEAN YOUR GUNS. PLEASE LEAVE THEM WHEN YOUR
(sic)
DONE. PLEASE DO NOT TAKE THESE RAGS
. I wouldn’t think of it.

It was still dark when we got up the next morning, a Sunday. There were snow-covered hills all around, and the town seemed dead. We went to the Town Cafe for breakfast. A bold headline in the
Billings Gazette
for sale inside said: “Three Killed in a Bar Brawl.” A big deal. In small print below the headline it said that 665 of the park’s bison had been shot so far, because they had migrated out of the park seeking food. They had been shot by the men from the Montana Department of Wildlife returning nightly to our motel. About as many more bison would be butchered by spring. That’s nearly a third of the entire Yellowstone herd.

Not one of the dozens of tables was occupied. “Where is everyone?” I asked the waitress. “Gone elk hunting,” she said.

The walls of the cafe were decorated with row after row of heads: bighorn sheep, bison, mule deer, and elk. We left at about 7:30
A.M.
, as it was getting light, after eating what we could of the biggest pancakes I’d ever seen in my life. Stepping out of the cafe in the gray dawn, I saw a raven fly overhead, heading directly over a herd of bison grazing just in front of us, near the stone entranceway to Yellowstone Park—the gateway to heaven.

The wolves had been in Yellowstone only since the fall of 1994, when they were reintroduced by the very same federal agencies that had only fifty years earlier engaged in a very costly but successful campaign of exterminating them with poison, traps, and dynamite. The
wolves were now being brought back at an expense of millions of dollars, even though they would surely have returned on their own. If they had been allowed to come on their own, they would have been protected under the Endangered Species Act. By
deliberately
introducing this endangered species, the government could legally shoot them when they left park boundaries. The wolves would not be inviolate, but under government jurisdiction. The introduced wolves had formed packs, and would soon have pups. Lots of pups. They would prevent the overabundant elk, deer, and bison from creating a hell of the ecosystem. Already, the ungulates had multiplied unchecked and were denuding the park. With the wolves cutting their numbers, poplars would again grow back. Beavers could again find food. Streams would be dammed, and more ducks, geese, and swans would breed, meadows would form, and rails, wrens…and so on. It would be a community, and the community I feel psychically a part of includes all of these, plus bears and moose and ravens.

My contact and friend, Doug Chadwick from
National Geographic
magazine, had told me that it was “guaranteed” we would see wolves in the Lamar Valley. They were all radio-tagged, and between aerial and ground-based surveys, everyone knew where they were and what they were doing practically all the time. Ironically, these few wolves—now fifty-two in the whole park—were celebrities, whereas before all wolves were “vermin.” Now every tourist brochure about Yellowstone bragged about every detail of their lives. There was even a Web page on the Internet devoted to them. Every wolf was identified and its history known as though it were someone’s pet.

On this first day in the park, we did not see wolves, not even the famous Druid pack of the Lamar Valley. We saw many bison and elk in the open valleys under snow-clad mountains that were crisscrossed with dense networks of elk and bison tracks. At Mammoth Hot Springs, bison were wandering down the street in front of the office buildings. Bison lying along the side of the road seemed oblivious to us in the car, staring at us through big, dark, bulging eyes. The animals seemed to be in a torpor. We passed occasional deer, coyotes, and bighorned sheep.

Finally, we saw four coyotes in the distance with several ravens near them. Within minutes, I heard four different raven calls I had never heard before. The knocking of these ravens was a series of only four rapid sounds that seemed more wooden than the more liquid and rapid calls of those with the Maine accent that I was used to. Although we did not see the wolves just yet, we found one recently wolf-killed elk calf. Only skin and bones were left, but a dozen ravens flew up. By the end of our ten-day stay, I had seen nine wolf-killed elk cows and calves. All had ravens feeding on them.

The next morning, we headed to the Lamar Valley as it was getting light, and we repeatedly saw ravens flying overhead. We saw singles, pairs, and small groups of up to a half dozen. Whenever there were two flying together, we’d occasionally see one dip its wing and then we’d hear a
glug-glug-glug
call. During the next week, we’d see most of the ravens traveling in pairs in the early morning, and the
glug-glug-glug
call and wing-dipping were characteristic. I had heard an Eskimo legend about ravens dipping their wing to indicate prey to human hunters, while at the same time making a certain call. I wondered if that was the display.

We again saw no wolves, but just beyond the Lamar Valley we found two just-killed elk by “following” ravens. The Soda Butte pack that had made the kill had left most of the meat. The two female elk carcasses lay almost side by side, up the slope from Soda Butte. One was ripped open at the neck only, and the other had its flank torn open. Dozens of ravens and four bald eagles and a golden eagle were all around them. The ravens ignored the golden and bald eagles, but at the cliffs near Mammoth Hot Springs we had just seen a pair of ravens attack a golden eagle and escort it away. Just a mile or two up the road, near Pebble Creek, we found three more fresh elk cow carcasses and many wolf and coyote tracks. One carcass had a large hole cut into the rear end, and ravens were using it to get deep into the elk. Two more elk carcasses were within a half mile of this one, and ravens were with them also. The wolves here kill often, eat the choicest part at each carcass, then move on to kill again. It
is
a raven’s heaven.

The long weekend was over when we returned to Gardiner in the afternoon. It was also the end of the second or late annual elk hunt, which takes place only on four-day “weekends,” Friday through Monday. The bison shooters had left, and the Best Western motel seemed almost deserted. Looking out the window beyond the parking lot and over the town, I saw about fifteen to twenty ravens gamboling in the wind rising off the high hill just northwest of town. Ravens circled high in the sky in all directions. I was quickly drawn out to take a drive to observe them more closely. Above the ridges around town I saw other crowds of them swirling, diving, playing, flying with bald eagles against the blue-black snow clouds. One eagle had a red tag on its left wing, and a raven kept flying at the circling eagle, trying to peck this tag.

The eagles were heading into a communal roost in a valley filled with large Douglas fir trees. The hillside behind the towering firs was dotted with elk slowly descending out of the park, and it was braided with a network of tracks, as more and more elk were leaving the park. They came in long files, following one another’s tracks through the deep snow to conserve energy. Hungry animals.

The eagles came singly, diving with still and partially folded wings. They extended their wings just after passing the roost, then wheeled around to brake their descent, and came in for a gentle landing on a tree. As each bird landed, it made high chittering or peeping calls like those of gulls or sandpipers, which some think are contact calls for their mates. Scores of magpie nests dotted the willow thickets in washes between the sagebrush-covered hills. In this area, barely a five-minute drive from the motel, I saw many blood-smeared drag marks in the snow where hunters had pulled elk to the road. There would be many gut piles here, but no wolves. Would there be feeding ravens?

In the park, just a one-minute raven’s flight to the south, the wolves of each pack kill an elk on average every 1.5 days. Ravens always arrive immediately and start feeding at each fresh carcass. Ravens often arrive even before the elk is down. That evening, in town, wildlife filmmaker Bob Landis showed us film footage of a pack of wolves trotting leisurely among a group of elk, testing them for several minutes. One of them suddenly shifted gears and picked out
one
elk to pursue relentlessly even as it rejoined the herd. Eventually, the wolf grabbed the elk by the throat, and another wolf helped pull it down. Ravens were flying over the wolves as they made the kill.

Were the ravens completely tied to the wolves or would they feed at the gut piles outside the park? To find out, I drove up the little dirt road toward Jardine early the next morning. As soon as the dawn came, I heard and saw ravens. Most of them were in pairs, flying side by side from one end of the horizon to the other. Where might they be traveling, and why?

I started to walk up into the rocky, sagebrush-covered hills on a well-worn bison trail. Then I soon found and followed the red lines through the snow where gutted elk carcasses had been dragged. In three and a half hours, I located a total of sixteen elk gut piles, most containing liver, spleen, lungs, intestines, stomach, and diaphragm. There were no ravens feeding on any of them, though some had been fed from. Why hadn’t the birds descended on this food bonanza in large numbers and quickly obliterated it all? I was surprised, but what I saw was congruent with a set of experiments I had done in Nova Scotia.

I had gone in mid-winter to the Canadian Wolf Research Center in Shubernacadie, Nova Scotia, to observe ten semitame wolves in a ten-acre outdoor wooded enclosure. In experiments for testing raven’s preferences, I had put down two meat piles simultaneously. The wolves had fed as a group, and only at one pile at a time. There, as here at Yellowstone, the ravens had a choice—to feed with the wolves, or to feed without them. They invariably had chosen to be
with
the wolves. They had fed where the wolves were currently feeding or had just recently fed. These observations, given the raven’s fears that I had observed previously, were about as nonintuitive and surprising as anything I had ever seen or heard about ravens. It didn’t make sense.

Then I thought of my Maine ravens, who were so shy near carcasses that I had thought they might be almost paralytically afraid of dangerous ground predators. Did I have it backward? Had they been afraid because there were
no
wolves at the Maine carcass? I became excited, wanting ever more data. Maybe ravens are “wolf-birds!” Maybe they had evolved with wolves in a mutualism that is millions
of years old, so that they have innate behaviors that link them to wolves, making them uncomfortable without their presence.

During my present attempt to increase my sample size of gut piles, I kept going higher and higher. I eventually reached deeper snow, and open sage country, then stands of Douglas fir where I heard red squirrels, red-breasted nuthatches, and Clark’s nutcrackers, in addition to ravens. In the Douglas firs, I came across blood flecks on the snow without carcass drag marks, indicating a wounded animal. I followed the spoor and soon found a dead elk cow with rifle bullet hole through her paunch. One or two ravens had left tracks on the dusting of fresh snow, and the birds had taken an exposed eye and a piece of the elk’s tongue. Given that no wolf or coyote had been near this carcass, that is all they could have taken.

The carcass had not yet been opened. I lanced it with my jackknife and skinned it on one side to let the birds get at the hundreds of pounds of red, unspoiled meat. While I was working on the elk, three ravens came near and called loudly. One landed in a Douglas fir nearby, looked, then made both short and long rasping caws, and flew off. I went back to the motel, imagining seeing a huge crowd of ravens when I’d return in a few days.

In the meantime, I had seen thirty ravens at an elk fawn within one hour after it was killed by wolves inside the park. Additionally, Doug Smith, leader of the Yellowstone wolf recovery project, had taken us to see the wolf pen at the Lamar ranger station, and there we found a large congregation of ravens, even though there was not a scrap of meat left inside the pen. When I hiked up to the elk cow carcass the second and then the third and last times, I was surprised that there was still no crowd of ravens, despite the plentifully available meat.

Shortly after breakfast one morning, we drove east toward Cooke City. Near Soda Butte we came to two parked vans, one with a radio antenna on top, which indicated researchers and was a good sign of wolves nearby. We stopped and made introductions. Nathan Varley, Lisa Belmonte, and Dan McNulty were training three spotting scopes
on the hillside, and they invited us to take a peek through their spotting scope.