Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds

by Bernd Heinrich

  When I came back down the road to meet John in the evening, I climbed up into the spruce as usual to join him until it got fully dark and all the ravens had returned to their roosts. This evening, there were no ravens at the usual roost. John had indeed read the display correctly. Here the roosts were temporary. They really were “traveling information centers,” as we titled a joint research paper in the journal Animal Behaviour. This roost had traveled on.

  I had long been racking my brain how it could be possible that dozens, hundreds, even thousands (as one report from California indicated) of ravens can use a roost for days, or weeks, and after wandering independently all day, suddenly one evening, not one bird comes back! It would be easy enough to explain if the birds always traveled in a group, but they don’t. In the early morning, they might travel together to one or several food sites. After feeding, they are more or less independent for the rest of the day, only gathering up from all directions at the roost at night. Even when all feed on one carcass, they still come and go from it independently throughout the day. Some may feed only for a few minutes in the morning, and then spend the rest of the day flying many tens of miles over the countryside (to look for a possible next food bonanza?) primarily alone. Was there some agreed-upon signal the night before, like the social soaring that informs them of the next stop?

  As I dozed off to sleep that night, I mulled over what to do the next day. We knew a raven crowd would come eventually. Here in Maine they always do, sometime—maybe tomorrow, December 21, the next day, or two months from then if the meat lasted.

  Our experimental protocol called for keeping tabs on everything until the crowd arrived, but there invariably comes a time when you say: “Enough. It’s time to do something else.” It seemed that time had come. It was time to release the next bird. After that, we would have only sixteen more to go. I hoped with more releases, we would begin to see a pattern.

  The site chosen for our next release was about six miles (as the raven flies) from the previous one. I built another blind and lugged in five fifty-pound garbage bags full of meat and suet, just to make sure there was enough for a raven to share.

  It was 3:00 P.M. John was positioned up in his usual spruce, and I had been settled in my blind for half an hour. Our new bird, a dominant one, radio frequency 843, should be calm and ready to be released. Slowly, ever so slowly, I pulled the string on the door. Would the hungry bird welcome its freedom by rushing out to partake of the feast in front of him?

  Not at all. From inside, he pecked at the fully open door. He leaned out and shoveled snow with his bill just in front of the cage entrance for three-quarters of a hour! Will he ever leave his cage? I wondered, as my left leg fell asleep after holding stock-still for so long. Finally he walked out, shook vigorously as if after a long bath, and continued to peck at the snow, still ignoring the meat. He walked thirty feet west, returned, and paraded right in front of my blind. Then he flew up above me, perched in a tree, and preened for another half hour. He remained silent. Finally, he disappeared into the dense fog of the forest as it was getting dark and starting to rain hard. Our bird stayed close by for the night.

  It poured all night. As I lay in a warm bed under a watertight roof back at my camp, I savored my warmth and dryness, and I thought of the raven I had released that morning. He had not eaten anything for three days, and must now be burning off calories at a tremendous rate just to keep warm.

  As I settled into the spruce blind the next morning in the pitchblack, I was even more uncomfortable than usual. The driving rain had stopped, but a drizzle persisted in the heavy fog. Water settled on the branches, eventually causing a steady dripping. Lying down in the blind on my raincoat to avoid soaking up ice water from the snow, I experienced a new torture, custom-made for raven maniacs—drips of ice water hitting my face at random intervals in random places (right in the eye is the worst). Luckily, John relieved me after four hours, during which time our released bird had flown by only once. Totally unlike the previously released bird, which had alternately fed and then sat tight on some tree in the nearby forest, this one was a mover and seemed interested in joining other birds. First, he flew to visit the twenty birds at our giant aviary on the hill a mile to the north, then he also visited the second aviary with six birds to the west. Often he was out of radio contact. Do males recruit and females not? Was this just an annoying individual variation, which seem so prevalent in these birds, that would necessitate our enlarging our sample size before we would see a pattern emerge?

  Next morning was foggy and cold. Eventually, I began to make out the shapes of the territorial raven pair, dueting in low grunting honks. Half an hour later, I heard a long series of knock-knock, knockknock, like a stick hitting a hollow log. The rest of the day brought no surprises.

  As on the day before, Number 843 flew over the bait several times, but showed not the slightest intention of landing. Instead, he frequently wandered out of radio contact, possibly visiting other nearby ravens. At least twice, he visited the birds in the aviary a mile away.

  Near 10:00 A.M., the drifting fog was swirling through the trees, driven by a steady wind. It was as dark as evening, and then it poured rain. I left the blind. It was a good time to unload the 1,200-pound cow that filled the entire back of my pickup truck. I attached a chain to the cow and a nearby tree, drove forward ten feet, and presto, the raven bait was just where I wanted it. I cut the carcass open, then covered it with brush and snow, hiding it until later, when I would reveal it to the raven world for our next experiment. Before climbing the tree that would be my observation post, I rechecked the two baits. There were tracks at the first bait, and as expected, no tracks at the second bait; but Number 843’s beeps sounded close.

  Suddenly, a series of quick rasping quorks came closer and closer from the direction of the lake, where I had put the first bait. Then a pair of ravens came into view—coal black, with powerfully stroking wings. John had seen them come from the same direction for the past three days. They were probably the pair that had intermittently been harassing my released bird, Number 837. They came by me, flying close over the treetops and steering a straight course to the pine grove to the north, where I suspected they might build their nest next spring.

  Ten minutes later, a lone raven flew by, a white shoulder patch shining brightly against each dark wing. It was an adult we’d marked in a previous winter. That was a rare occurrence. We’d seen few of the 463 birds we had marked. With the exception of those residents near the cabin, I would eventually get reports of only eight marked ravens from an area of approximately 240,000 square miles stretching from Quebec, New Brunswick to Nova Scotia, Canada; and northern Maine to near Boston and western New York.

  Then I noticed moving black specks against the sky. Hooking one arm around the tree I had climbed, I lifted the binoculars to my eyes and observed ravens gamboling. What a sight! Soaring, diving, climbing, and spiraling down again, pairs and small groups and singles flew in close formation, separated, regrouped, over and over again. Gradually, they drifted over, covering a wide swath of sky in a big semicircle. They flew for miles, making air currents work for them, sailing in a sea. I was thrilled. I could have watched them all day. After about ten minutes, they banked down, folded their wings, and came shooting like so many black falling stars into the pines to the north. Was this the gang that would be led by Number 843 to the so-far-untouched meat pile?

  Ultimately, after all our time and effort, we ended up proving what I already deduced from other data from previous years; namely, that ravens who are knowledgeable about food can recruit others from communal roosts. The idea of recruitment is an old one that had been endlessly bandied about in the scientific literature. We were the first to provide sufficient proof that it does indeed occur.

  We had ascertained that knowledgeable birds are followed by naive birds, and that both leaders and followers eventually benefit from their behavior. The result is an inordinately simple, beautiful, and elegant system of sharing tha
t relies on mutualism rather then reciprocity.

  Our field studies provided a solid and much-needed conceptual framework in a context of behavior ecology. The studies addressed evolved adaptive patterns of behavior. Within that context, the individual variation that is so prevalent in ravens is more of a hindrance than a help in elucidating patterns within the population that we hoped to unravel. These studies could not tell us what was going on in the birds’ minds, however, because they were not fine-grained enough. They gave no indication of what was innate, learned, or due to insight. Individual variation might do that. Perhaps the best chance of seeing the involvement of mind would be by embracing individual variation and using it as a tool in future experiments.

  Ravens form powerful pair-bonds.

  THREE

  Ravens in the Family

  THERE IS SOMETHING UNIQUE ABOUT ravens that permits or encourages an uncanny closeness to develop with humans. Many people keep birds as pets, but I’ve never heard of anyone who has raised a raven to adulthood call the bird their “pet.” Instead, they consider it as child, or partner. One family in Maine with whom I recently talked reared a raven, Isaak, who was free on their farm. They described their association with Isaak as “a truly magical experience.” They talked endlessly about their “beautiful relationship” with the bird, and said that since he “allowed us into his world,” they stayed home summers just to be near him (or her, because the sexes are very difficult to tell apart), whereas before they had traveled. (Isaak, as with most tame ravens, eventually became independent and left.) Another family unabashedly called their raven their “son” and “a true friend” and they said they could “not imagine life without him.”

  What is the reason for such attachment? I believe it resides in mutual communication. A raven is expressive, communicates emotions, intentions, and expectations, and acts as though it understands you. This communication is privileged. It occurs when the individual close to the bird is trusted, has earned a trust that is not offered lightly. Given that trust, much is revealed that could otherwise never be seen.

  I received a letter in December 1993 from Klaus Morkramer, a medical doctor in Oberhausen, Germany, about his raven, Jakob, whom he regularly let “free” in his apartment. There was an opportunity I could not pass up, to get a different perspective on ravens than my usual one, perched in a tree or hiding in a spruce blind in the woods.

  First of all, I wondered how fast a raven would disassemble an apartment? I judged it shouldn’t take more than about three minutes, maybe five. Did this doctor live in a cave, with the capacity to adapt to a small urban terrorist?

  Jakob was born in the spring of 1992, having been orphaned when his nest fell in a storm. He was raised in an animal park at Wolgast in the former East Germany. Klaus had been a fan of corvid birds for a long time, and he considered ravens the “absolut Spitze” (absolute peak) of the corvid line. He learned of the raven from one of his patients, and contacted the family who ran the animal park. They sold him the bird for 200 deutsche marks (then about $90). His son Anatol took the train to Wolgast to pick up the raven, bringing it back in a small, darkened cage provisioned with a large sausage for sustenance on the long trip back to Oberhausen.

  The sudden arrival of Jakob at the doctor’s city apartment in the crowded industrial Essen area necessitated a quick solution to the housing problem. In foresight, a large parrot cage had already been ordered. Initially, it was to be installed on the terrace, where there was a veritable garden of trees, vines, and shrubs. It seemed an ideal place, but at first Klaus put the cage in the house to ease introductions. When it later came time to take the bird out to its allotted place, Morkramer found out that it was too late—he had not taken Jakob’s personality into account. Jakob protested to being moved out of the house, and won. “The raven always wins,” the Herr Doktor told me. Jakob had taken his first big step to becoming a full-fledged family member: He took up permanent residence in the living room.

  The next obvious move for Jakob would be to leave the cage and roam freely in the apartment itself. The rest is history. Wanting to see the results of this experiment for myself, I flew to Frankfurt, rented a car, and drove to Oberhausen.

  Before I took the elevator to the fourth floor apartment, I envisioned a scene not unlike the aftermath of a bull in the proverbial china shop, except that I knew a raven would work with more patience and attention to detail. Imagine my shock when I stepped into the large living room the Morkramer clan shared with Jakob. There were no white streaks on the black upholstered leather furniture. There were no white spots on the oak table. The table had silverware in place, a sugar bowl, a cream pitcher, and several delicate cappuccino cups. All were resting intact and upright upon the table. Most surprising of all were the antiques. Klaus has an expensive hobby seemingly incompatible with being a raven-keeper. He is a collector of Roman antiques. Priceless original Roman ceramics sat in alcoves along the side of the room next to large, filled book cases. Invaluable paintings hung on the walls. This was not a cave. It was a museum. In fact, the only rooms in disarray were the kids’ rooms and the kitchen. I was told Jakob voluntarily confined himself to the living room, fearing to enter other rooms far from the security of his cage.

  When I entered the apartment, Jakob was perched quietly in his four-by-four-by-two-foot cage next to Klaus’s favorite black leather chair. The raven seemed tranquil and uninterested in me. Poking his long bill out between the metal bars to Klaus, he held it still for a billshake, while gently nibbling fingers. The raven bowed his head sideways and further fluffed out his feathers as Klaus caressed his fuzzy head. “I have to do these greetings with him every day. The raven insists on it,” the doctor told me. “Every time I come home from work I have to go through the greeting ceremonies with him. If I’m too brief, he grabs my hand or finger and tries to pull me to him.” Klaus’s son Anatol is also greeted with soft intimate sounds, but the rest of the family (his wife, another son, a daughter) are greeted with harsh quorks.

  Jakob finally sidled up to the edge of the cage and thrust his bill out to me. Was this a friendly invitation? I decided it was, and accepted. It was an invitation all right, but not for a love nibble. One bite was enough for me.

  Despite his young age, Jakob’s tongue and mouth lining were black. Only in those ravens who have learned to be subordinate in the presence of superiors—and in a crowd of ravens, almost all encounter social superiors—does the mouth lining remain pink for several years. Jakob’s mouth color alone showed that he had already established himself as the alpha in the household. After completing the greeting ceremonies, we settled into easy chairs around a low table set for coffee.

  “Doesn’t he want to come out?” I asked.

  “Not yet. When he wants to come out he’ll let us know.”

  For the time being, we drank cappuccino. Jakob was preoccupied with the contents of his cage. Klaus told me that whenever he gets mail, Jakob demands to have his fair portion of it. Although he is never denied, he hops around violently, giving loud frustration calls when his keeper comes into the room with a handful of mail and doesn’t immediately deliver some to him. As soon as Jakob is handed a few pieces of junk mail, he quiets down and gets busy shredding them into little pieces. This task occupies him for about a half hour. I watched him work hard at it; his chest started to heave and his breathing became heavy.

  I could see right off that Jakob’s capacity for doing damage quickly and efficiently was great. I thought his deeds with the junk mail were admirable, however, although his intentions were not noble. According to Konrad Lorenz, “The capacity of an animal to cause damage is proportional to its intelligence.” If this is indeed an adequate IQ test, then Jakob, like many other ravens I’ve known, was close to genius.

  The junk mail having been adequately shredded, Jakob next pulled on the metal gratings of the door of his cage. That was the signal. If Jakob demands, Klaus obeys. Like Grip, the pet raven of Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, who eventua
lly “hopped upon the table, and with the air of some old necromancer appeared to be studying a great folio volume that lay open on a desk,” Jakob appeared to be biding his time for mischief. He carefully surveyed the room through the open cage door, then hopped down to the floor and flapped his wings violently for about a minute as if revving up before takeoff. After these warm-up exercises, he flew once around the room, then landed on his cage. Anatol brought him a closed cardboard box and set it down on the parlor floor. This drew Jakob’s attention, and he hopped off his cage at once and set to hammering holes and ripping off chunks of cardboard. When he had destroyed the box, Anatol offered him a small mail-order catalogue. When finished with that, Jakob fixed his attention on me.

  For preliminaries, he looked at me, flared his feather pants, spread his shoulders at the front so that the wings crossed just over the tail, and boldly ambled toward me, stopping only briefly to look me in the eye. He hopped still closer, sideways this time, looked me in the eye again, and drew his head back. Before I knew what was happening, he had delivered a mighty heave into my thigh with his sharp, pointed bill. I jumped back. He advanced again. I was told that he wanted the ballpoint pen with which I was taking notes. Oh! Fearing more blackmail from Corvus triumphanus, I surrendered it readily. He soon seemed satisfied, settling onto an arm of a leather chair. He did not move from the spot for more than an hour while we humans chatted. I noticed him watching us with his lively brown eyes.