Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (35 page)

Female knocking display. Note dark mouth color of an adult
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Wild ravens at a carcass near my house in Vermont. Female is at the left, and male to the right. Note her lanceolate long throat feathers during her bow, when both wings are elevated and her tail is flared
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Here the wild bird (perch at left) is watching one of the four hiding food, and it then dug in the snow (inset) to retrieve and steal the cache. Inside aviary in Maine
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Planning by a raven. The bird had made a groove, cutting off the tip of the bread-loaf-sized chunk of suet. Then it cut a groove to cut off an even larger piece. Note peck marks in groove and small suet chips it had left next to groove, as it concentrated on the later, larger, reward
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Young raven testing the reaction of a dog
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On February 2, 1995, I released a single wild raven into their aviary—a female in her first year. She had mottled mouth color and brown-tinged tail and wing primaries. Goliath and Houdi, then the most dominant male and female, respectively, both gave violent chase. Goliath cornered the stranger in the shed, put on his macho display—ears, erect posture, bill up—and crowded in upon her. Occasionally, he yanked her wing and tail feathers, to which she objected vociferously but without challenge. Fuzz, the subordinate male, at no time approached her. In contrast to Goliath, Houdi pursued the new female relentlessly. She crowded up to her and pulled her wing and tail feathers. The newcomer sometimes tried to ward Houdi off by reaching out with her foot, but kept retreating, all the while making rasping protests as she was being physically abused. The question of dominance
and sex having been established, the four birds then ignored her completely, quite in contrast to similar human situations I was aware of.

Feeding rights were another matter. When I placed food onto the snow and all the others fed at it, the stranger was always attacked if she came close. Perching by herself and watching them feed, she then erupted in a temper tantrum. She violently hammered her perch and the walls of the shed where she was hiding. Whenever she watched the other birds feeding, she resumed her outburst. She vented her anger only when the others were at the food that she was prevented from reaching. Hours later, when they were not at the food, she ventured out of the shed and down to the ground to try to feed, but the four violently jumped at her whenever she came close to the food pile. When they jumped at her, she crouched in a submissive display with her neck pulled in, wings lowered, and tail vibrating. This is the raven’s extreme entreating display saying, “Please…” (“…let me feed,” “…let me mate,” “…don’t pick on me,” depending on context). The gang of four didn’t relent. Theirs was an extraordinarily high degree of cohesiveness or cooperation in a group of ravens.

The wild bird eventually became even more afraid of her four conspecifics than she was of me. She perched calmly within fifteen feet of me, instead, concentrating on the others, especially when they buried caches of food in the snow. She flew down repeatedly to try to dig out these caches, but attempted the thefts only when the cacher had its back turned or was preoccupied with feeding. At first, she tried to raid a cache immediately after the cacher had finished making it and had flown back to the food pile. Each of the four cachers were soon wise to her ways, leaving the food pile to come back and chase her if she as much as flew near their latest cache site. After a few false starts, she raided earlier caches to which the cachers were less attentive. By this strategy of deception, she sometimes succeeded in recovering the others’ food and getting a bite to eat before being caught raiding.

Within a couple of days, Houdi’s aggression toward the new wild female subsided somewhat. Nevertheless, all four still chased her from any food pile I provided, and she still fed herself exclusively from their cached food. I presumed that in a few more days she would be toler
ated at the carcass itself, and all would be well, given a superabundance of food. When I had to leave to go back to Vermont, I made sure the aviary was well stocked with food, including two large calf carcasses. Given the abundance of food, I expected tolerance to blossom, because it normally does within groups.

When I came back, I found, to my great shock and surprise, the stranger lying dead on the snow. There was congealed blood on her breast feathers, skin was torn from both her legs and wings, and there were peck and puncture wounds with hematomas all over her head and the base of her bill. She had bled, and only live animals bleed. Ravens regularly peck out the eyes of animals they intend to eat, and they have a strong social inhibition, or “rule,” that prevents them from pecking the eyes of other ravens, yet this raven’s eyes were punctured. In short, there was no doubt whatsoever that my four friends had killed her. She had died trying to defend herself, lying on her back in the snow, using her feet in defense. They had not eaten any of her flesh.

Perhaps my gang of four, being confined together for an unnaturally long period, had become an “exclusive club,” and this had reduced their tolerance of strangers. But that was not the cause of the murder. It was only an ingredient that led to it.

The raven’s murder seemed extraordinary because I had previously seen that even starving ravens do not kill the weakest of the group. Ravens routinely threaten or mildly attack others who are in the process of robbing their caches. I had also seen several birds unite to attack another individual for reasons that were not clear to me. But this killing was a severe punishment. It went far beyond the usual behavior aimed at repelling a competitor from a cache or for showing displeasure over a mild infraction. This was censure of the severest kind.

The murder was probably punishment for repeated infractions. Feelings of outrage that are used to justify cruelty are reminiscent of our own behavior, and have been a major source of human suffering the world over. We cannot expect more from ravens.

Retaliatory acts are known among birds. Many birds harass those they have seen raid their nests. At the University of Groningen in the
Netherlands, which I once visited, a pair of magpies built a nest next to the biophysics building, while a pair of carrion crows had a nest nearby across the parking lot. Soon there were frequent magpie-versus-crow battles. In the escalating battles, the crows finally killed one of the magpies. From the crows’ perspective, justice was served; from the magpies’, injustice.

Individuals of the same species can also be singled out. Once in the winter woods in Vermont, I saw a very excited group of ravens make a concerted effort to pin down and attack one individual. I and others have observed crows doing the same thing. To me it had at first seemed logical to assume that the birds were attacking the other simply because it was a stranger, rather than because it had done something they disapproved of, or because it has harmed only one of its attackers. To admit to the possibility that it had harmed one and the
others
felt outraged would be to go beyond the angry raven to the potentially moral one with standards of behavior that it expects others to follow.

Most birds attack others that come near their nests, mates, food, or territories. The attacked birds are punished for presumed intentions. Few would interpret this behavior as moral—the birds are simply protecting their self-interests. We tend to think of morality as behavior that promotes not just our own direct interests, but those of the group. The distinction is not as clear as it may appear, however. For example, a crow defending its nest from a raven may in fact endanger itself and assist its mate and its helpers at the nest. Colonial breeders defend the whole colony as well as their own interests. A bird that has once caught a certain nest raider in the act will remember that species, and even that individual. For instance, at Cornell University where Kevin McGowan climbs crow nests to band the young, he is singled out among all the students and professors for attack by crows when he walks across campus. He is attacked first by the parents of the nest he is nearest, but then the neighbors join in, helping to defend the first pair’s nest.

Ravens would remember an individual that consistently raided their caches, if they caught him in the act almost every time. This is possible
in the confines of an aviary, where the thief cannot escape vigilant eyes. Violators are remembered, and apparently, violators are attacked. That’s primitive justice in their system and ours. In such a system, the “others”—those that are identified for one reason or another, or that identify themselves as “others”—are often automatically excluded.

I presume that the murdered wild raven in the experiment above had raided the caches of all four captive ravens. All four may simply have been defending their individual interests. If so, their behavior was not moral, in the sense we use the term. On the other hand, if one of the four birds did not see any of its own caches being raided, but still lustily joined in the murder because the others’ caches were raided, then academically speaking, it was a moral raven seeking the human equivalent of justice, because it defended the group’s interest at a potential cost to itself.

Two subsequent experiments confirmed that group interests can drive individual volition. In one of these I introduced three yearling ravens (who had grown up together) to my group of six who had been together for two years. The six attacked these three instantly, even though none had raided caches. More tellingly, though, when one of my six attacked one of the three, its five group-mates jumped in to help in the attack. In the second case, when one pair got ready to nest, one of the mated birds at times became aggressive to one of the four other birds in the aviary. Interestingly, whenever one of the pair started an attack, first its mate and then all of the other birds also helped in attacking the same victim. These observations show that outrage is exerted, and apparently felt, along “party lines,” obliterating the birds’ original individual tolerances. Futhermore, the gang attacks are instigated by leaders; there are clear followers. The extreme case, the murder, was thus a social—and hence moral—act.