Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (45 page)

Goliath and Whitefeather’s nest in a pine tree
.

As I photographed the nest and eggs, I thought again of the chicken egg experiments I had done before. There was no need to repeat that experiment here, because I already knew that ravens incubate chicken eggs in their nests, but immediately eat them outside. I wondered instead how quickly the ravens would eat a chicken egg left on the ground below the nest.

Later that day, I left two white eggs on two different pine stumps, one below the nest tree and one some thirty feet south of it. I could think of all sorts of logical reasons why nothing would happen. I knew, if it were a crow, the bird coming back would instantly see the white eggs and fly down to eat them. It would not matter if the eggs were resting on the ground or floating a foot above it. But a raven would notice something “off,” even if they were lying on a stump. My ravens were afraid of a branch that appeared to move by itself, they quickly approached round things, yet they hid in fright for a day and a half from a helium balloon floating above a string. An egg on a pine stump below the nest? Ravens have expectations. Eggs magically appearing on a pine stump would not be one of theirs. To them they might appear as to us oranges floating in midair: spooky. And just calling it “neophobia” would not explain it, that much I knew. I sprinted away to climb my spruce and watch from the nearby ridge.

In just two minutes, a bird was back, making long rasping calls, odd ones. Then I heard high-pitched, upward-inflected calls that sounded like a question, as we might say, “Wh
aaat?
” I had never heard these calls before. By the time I got to the top of my tree, the pair was flying toward Gammon Ridge, all the while continuing the strange new calls. The birds acted spooked. They flew about a mile to the ridge. Straining with my high-powered binoculars, I could just barely make out their two black shapes perched closely side by side on a poplar. At 5:45
P.M.
, thirty-one minutes later, both flew off, making honking calls, and they disappeared from my view. This was getting to be stranger than I had expected.

An irrational fear seized me: Might they desert the nest because of those white chicken eggs?! You can imagine the anxiety I felt the next morning just before I had to return to Vermont. Would a raven be on the nest? At 5:30
A.M.
, I walked toward it to find out. On the way, I went past the calf carcass I had left for them on the path. A turkey vulture flew up—so one had finally sneaked in at dawn. Almost instantly, a raven came from the nest area, and with loud
kek-kek-kek
calls chased the vulture down the valley.

I drove back to Maine the very next weekend to check on the ravens. Surely, the young would have hatched, and I could forget all of that funny business about scary eggs. I drove all Saturday morning, May 23, 1998, and got to the cabin near noon, walking right to the nest. Silence at the nest area! The silence hit me like a sledgehammer. The two chicken eggs were still on the stumps exactly where I’d put them. Now I had to climb the tree. Not a raven sound anywhere. I started climbing. As I got close to the nest, I suddenly heard a raven’s call, then two birds called, and the pair came flying high above me, scolding me mildly. I was again hopeful of seeing the pink just-hatched young in a few seconds. When I looked over the nest edge, I felt a shock. I saw neither young, nor eggs. There was only nest lining. Oddly, the nest cup was shallow, and the nest lining seemed loose. Had the nest been abandoned and then robbed of its eggs? Absent-mindedly, I pulled at the deer hair and shredded bark, and there beneath a blanket of nest lining lay the four eggs! They had been
deliberately covered to hide them, or to delay their cooling while being left during a break from incubation duties. I felt them—they were cool. I had never before seen anything like this behavior. But it was a warm day, and perhaps Whitefeather could afford to take a break. Did she have notions about heating and cooling, seeing and hiding? The twenty-one day incubation term was about over. The young would be extraordinarily late, but for Goliath and Whitefeather’s very first nesting attempt in the wild, it was not a bad start—although this nesting attempt would also end in failure.

We had already shared a long, rich history. I wondered what new adventures would be in store for all three of us. As I sometimes do after a hard ascent, I savored a few moments to look around and reflect. The “climb” to the ravens has sometimes been hard but the results have been deeply satisfying. I feel that I’ve won a wider vantage point for seeing some of the raven’s ironies and seeming contradictions, much as I then had a vantage point for viewing the forest. There is no end to the forest, and there is no end to the mind. Indeed, the greater the complexity, the more it is mind, as the more trees there are, the more it is a forest. It can never be encompassed fully.

More important, I have come to touch the world and the travails of a totally different yet kindred being that makes me feel less alone. I’ve also seen lots of morning stars and sunsets, felt alive in the snow and rain, sensed the cycling of pulsating life and silent death, found new human friendships, forgotten old traumas, and felt passion and peace.

Raven reducing forward-flight momentum when landing
.

I
N MY PREVIOUS BOOK
,
Ravens in Winter
, I explored the process of trying to solve a specific problem; do some ravens attract strangers and share their food with them, and if so how and why? Food-sharing behavior was well-known, but only for group-living animals. Ravens were known as notoriously aggressive territorial birds, and sharing if it occurred would be based on a novel mechanism. So it turned out to be.

This book continues where the first left off, but with some important differences. In the original study, the ravens’ behavior was treated from the standpoint of behavioral ecology, a discipline that seeks to reveal evolved behaviors that solve specific problems that relate to the population. The behaviors are assumed to have been mindlessly selected by evolution through millions of years of history. The intentions of individuals are seldom an issue. In this book, in contrast, I have tried to give a detailed picture of specific ravens I have known, and I explore the possibility that some of their behavior is derived from conscious choice. My emphasis and primary reason for writing the book, however, was to record original observations and the adventures that made them possible. My interpretations are personal opinions and they will undoubtedly be modified. But facts are permanent.

The more facts I learned about ravens, the more apparent contradictions I saw. Sometimes ravens went out of their way to pull the tails of wild wolves and eagles. At other times I saw ravens afraid of a mouse, and even a moth, a moving twig, and a turtle, and a pile of Cheerios. I saw territorial ravens spend over an hour trying to chase as many as eight others at a time away from their food. I also saw the same individuals later welcome others and share the same food.
Sometimes ravens nested in defended territories of tens of square miles, and at other times they nest within a hundred paces of one another, even though they have the option to nest apart. Individuals performed feats of insight and intelligence, while also behaving in nonsensical ways. I found ravens forming exclusive pair bonds years before breeding, and staying paired despite conflicts. Yet extra-pair copulations occur in some populations of ravens. The birds expended incredible amounts of energy establishing dominance, yet dominant birds commonly fed last and the largest strongest bird showed the most fear. They were the shyest and most alert birds I had ever known who shunned humans in New England, yet they actively follow humans in some other areas. They are as tame as sparrows and pigeons in some cities, while retreating into the wilderness in other areas. I received reports of them warning people of an imminent attack by a predator, yet they readily feed on corpses. They are one of nature’s premier scavengers, yet they feared animal carcasses, and that fear was not learned. It was innate. They gobbled individual cheetos with gusto, yet recoiled from a pile of them. To get food from feared carcasses they stole it from those birds who would go near (eagles or magpies) or they recruited others and went in as a crowd. Once a crowd was at a carcass they all suddenly seemed to try to cache as much meat as possible, yet although they could have stayed near the carcass and stored food nearby, they usually expended much time and energy to fly miles to hide each morsel singly, separately and in isolation. These and other contradictions were not readily explained by theories of behavioral ecology, yet they could not be ignored just because they were not understood. I felt there must be some underlying adaptive pattern that would explain the uniqueness of these birds, as well as shed light on their prominent esteem in almost all northern cultures, spanning America, Europe, and Asia.

The key to solving the many apparent conflicts in their behavior would, I knew, reside in their natural history and an understanding of the selective pressures they face and have faced. I eventually deduced that ravens have evolved in close association with intelligent and potentially dangerous carnivores: first mainly wolves, then transferring their allegiance also to prehuman and human aboriginal hunters. To
see traces of the ancient connections I traveled to the north (Baffin island in the arctic, Nova Scotia, Yellowstone Park) where ravens still, or again, closely associate with their mammalian hunters and where they rely on them for almost all their food in winter and where in turn the ravens may signal the hunters about the availability and/or location of prey. The social hunters, both canids and humans, are both dangerous and intelligent, and intelligence is required by the ravens as well, to benefit by and to remain in the hunting symbiosis.

My previous work with bumblebee foraging behavior and bees’ symbiotic relationship with the plant community through pollination predisposed me to the notion of a symbiosis between ravens, wolves and ultimately early humans. I therefore became all the more intrigued by the famous Odin myth of the Ancient Norsemen.

In a biological symbiosis one organism typically shores up some weakness or deficiency of the other(s). As in such a symbiosis, Odin the father of all humans and gods, though in human form was imperfect by himself. As a separate entity he lacked depth perception (being one-eyed) and he was apparently also uninformed and forgetful. But his weaknesses were compensated by his ravens, Hugin (mind) and Munin (memory) who were a part of him. They perched on his shoulders and reconnoitered to the ends of the earth each day to return in the evening and tell him the news. He also had two wolves at his side, and the man/god-raven-wolf association was like one single organism in which the ravens were the eyes, mind, and memory, and the wolves the providers of meat or nourishment. As god, Odin was the ethereal part—he only drank wine and spoke only in poetry. I wondered if the Odin myth was a metaphor that playfully and poetically encapsulates ancient knowledge of our prehistoric past as hunters in association with two allies to produce a powerful hunting alliance. It would reflect a past that we have long forgotten and whose meaning has become obscured and badly frayed as we abandoned our hunting cultures to become herders and agriculturists, to whom ravens act as competitors.

I didn’t start out with the intention of exploring or explaining the possibility of an ancient symbiotic relationship between man, wolves (dog) and ravens. As others, I had previously assumed that the
well-known association between ravens and wolves and sometimes people, was simply a reflection of the raven’s opportunism. However, almost by accident I found innate hard-wired responses in ravens that not only cleared up most of the contradictions I had seen, but that also pointed to a relationship with hunters that is ancient and evolved. It turned out, to my great surprise, that ravens don’t feed next to wolves because they have to, they do it because they want to.

Ravens are, however, indeed highly flexible and they of course exist in many areas where wolves no longer roam. In northern Maine during the seasonal moose hunt, ravens appeared to associate with human hunters instead. At my main study area in western Maine the ravens showed great fear of all cattle carcasses I provided for them, but they overcame their fear by recruiting even strangers, and feeding in the safety of crowds. In contrast, in eastern Oregon where there are also no wolves, ravens used intermediaries to get food. Magpies and eagles fed unhesitatingly at a deer and carried off meat to cache. The ravens harassed the magpies and eagles until they dropped their meat.

Ravens are forced to associate and get along with not only dangerous intelligent carnivores at carcasses, they are there also thrown into direct competition with each other. Studies in my aviary and outside it indicated that ravens recognize individuals, not only their own kind, but also of other species. The birds have specific play behavior that appears to have been selected by evolution to gauge the responses of potentially dangerous and specific carnivores. Thus, living in a world of individuals of their own and other species, rather than only one composed of different kinds or categories, the birds’ world is inordinately more complex than had been previously assumed, and their intelligence relates to that social environment.

In the latter part of the book I try to confront what intelligence is and how it relates to learning, innate responses and insight. I report observations and tests that were conducted, and describe how they have been received by psychologists and others. I conclude that ravens are able to manipulate mental images for solving problems. They are aware of some aspects of their private reality, seeing with their minds at least some of what they have seen with their eyes.