As mentioned previously, my aviary ravens stopped pecking a chicken and a turkey within a day or two of being introduced to them, when they presumably “knew” these fowl. Yet the interest and interaction with some animals, including dogs and humans, lasts much longer. My six ravens “know” me. I am their “wolf.” There is hardly a day that I do not enjoy visiting with them, and they in turn act as though they want to be with me. Of course, they come to me for food, but they still gather around me when they are fully satiated. When I bring them a pile of food and walk away, some of them almost invariably leave the food to follow me. Some of them act as if trying to engage me in play. There are several individuals (White, Yellow, and Green) who used to routinely sneak up behind me, nip me on the pant cuff, and then look up at me; or they skimmed closely over my head from behind. I then yelled at them and feigned aggressive moves toward them, and that seemed to induce them to come right back and try it again. When I walked away, they followed like puppies.
For another mind-blowing experience I now cite the experiences that University of Vermont graduate students Cindy Riegal wrote down for me: “On the morning of December 25, 1996 in the Langtang region of Nepal, a piece of bread was taken from my brother Jerry’s side as he slept out under the rising sun. We know it was taken in the early morning because our guides from Kyangin Gompa who had led us (Jerry, myself, and Eric Busch) over Ganja La (pass) the previous day generously left it next to him before they headed home and woke him briefly to inform him of their gift. Our assumption was the one of the ravens we had seen soaring above us as we descended the pass had cleverly and quietly stolen the bread. As we started our trek to Tarkeghyand through remote alpine terrain that day, we noticed two ravens flying above us as we walked. Around noon, we stopped for some snacks near a stone structure used as a temporary yak herder camp in the summer. The ravens in pursuit flew down and landed on the stones about fifteen feet from where we rested. We subsequently lured them closer with the raisins from our gorp until they were virtually eating out of our hands. Eventually we started walking again but got off track for a few hours. I don’t recall the ravens sticking with us through our harrowing adventures trying to find the trail down in a forested valley, but once we were back on the open alpine slopes, the pair seemed to reappear. They continued to follow us until we set up camp at dusk. We were up and walking early the next morning once again with a pair of ravens in tow. They followed us for most of the second day until we began to descend in elevation and entered more forested terrain. They received no food from us other than the “stolen” bread and a few raisins. We had traveled in a remote area; we saw no other people during the trek with the company of the ravens.”
Do the ravens follow the moose hunters or their trucks, or associate either with food? At two moose kill sites I visited on that trip to Moosewood Lake, all the entrails other than stomach contents had already been removed, so unfortunately I was unable to tell if the birds arrived “immediately” after the kill. The next year, my friend Bill Valleau, who is also one of my former zoology professors from the University of Maine, drew a moose permit in the lottery. Bill hunted about a hundred miles father north, near Bridgewater, on the side of “Number 9” mountain. Two bull moose charged their truck as he and his sons rode around on the gravel roads. Bill wrote me, “The ravens were with us throughout the hunt. We felt that they were watching us, waiting for the kill. We shot a cow moose on the second day and the ravens were circling our kill while I was gutting it out!” Twice his son Dana, a lawyer for the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, shot a deer, and waited five minutes before he went in to make sure it was dead. When he got to the deer, a raven was perched nearby. “I had assumed the ravens were attracted by the shot,” Dana said. Maine game wardens find ravens the best assistants in helping to apprehend poachers. Very often, when they investigate a site where ravens are circling, the poachers are still gutting their kill.
Sometimes, humans have more to offer than moose guts. George Schaller told me that in Tibet, ravens inevitably check out most remote human encampments, probably for food scraps. Similarly, Gary Clowers has reported that the seashore ravens in Baja California check all the tourist campsites in the morning. Ravens live in Inuit villages and other far-northern American settlements, and they now are moving south into the big cities, including Los Angeles, which is already inhabited by crows. All across America and Europe, ravens congregate at dumps. The food bonanzas to be found there likely have a historical antecedent in the remains of hunter-killed carcasses of mammoths, giant ground sloths, and caribou. Ravens are, and likely always have been, not just wolf-birds. They are our birds as well, and it is small wonder that they hold such a prominent place in our myths and legends.
Throughout the hundreds of thousands of years after humans came from Africa to pursue the vast northern herds of large antlered deer, aurochs, and mammoth, the raven, Corvus corax, would have almost certainly been there with them, scavenging on the kills. When we breached the American continent after the lowered level of the oceans left a land bridge to Alaska during the ice ages, we spread south and east, killing the unsuspecting and unprepared megafauna. Never in their evolutionary history had the animals encountered such hunters as humans. It was an opportunity that the raven also would not have failed to exploit. Corvids are known from fossils dating to the Miocene epoch, and raven fossils in the American southwest date back to the Pleistocene (Magish & Harris, 1976). Ravens could have been here at least hundreds of thousands of years before us, along with the wolves. As far as Raven was concerned, Man, the new predator, was probably just a surrogate wolf who also usually hunted in packs.
The wolf had been indispensable to the ravens in the north, and farther north the polar bear took its place and still does. To the south were great cats. With their sharp, shearing teeth, the predators brought down and cut open animals that were diseased, weakened, or dead. The raven’s long, strong bill could pick meat from the hide and from leftover bones. The mammalian hunters might have tried to take all the meat they could, but unless they were starving or the hunting was poor, they would have left piles of entrails that the birds who tagged along or monitored most hunts would have eaten. Human hunters may even have deliberately left meat, because the presence of ravens could have been seen as an omen for a successful hunt, as they were omens for a successful raid to the Vikings.
If the hunting was good and the hunting bands were small, then hunters likely ate only part of a mammoth before going on to kill the next. Ravens and wolves would have feasted. Since ravens to this day associate with hunting bands of wolves, I suspect that in the north they might still follow people with dogs or associate with dogs near people. Why should a raven care whether it is following a pack of wolves or a pack of fur-clad human hunters? Raven would preferably follow the best. Ravens are the quintessential northern bird. It is no accident that they are also the bird most closely associated with humans in the culture and folklore of northern people, whether Norse, Inuit, or any of a large number of others.
Odin, the ruler of the Norse gods, also called “Hrafna-gwd” or Raven god, kept two wolves at his side and two ravens on his shoulders. The wolves and the ravens accompanied him on the hunt and into battle. Thus, ravens were for thousands of years associated with wolves, and with mind, men, and the gods. From the wolf-raven associations came the northern name “Wolfram,” from Wolf-rhaben or “wolf-raven,” once a great warrior’s name.
I could not follow a Viking raid to trace origins of the old myths. But I could jump on a plane and in several hours be in the Arctic to see the raven where it has not been persecuted in recent history due to recent ignorance, and where it does not shy away from humans by hiding in the wilderness. I could be where, I hoped, it might instead still seek humans out and associate with them. I hoped to see at least traces of a long relationship, having heard vague rumors that Eskimo hunters “talk to” ravens, and vice versa.
Note: A parallel example to the one I am proposing her
e is that of the African greater honeyguide, Indicator indicator, as discussed (pp. 164-169) in Donald Griffin’s book Animal Minds. The honeyguide is a small bird that feeds on bee grubs, wax, and honey. It communicates with the ratel or honey-badger, Mellivora capensis, guiding it to bee nests that the badger then opens. They then share the food. In some areas of Africa, the bird has transferred its honeyguiding behavior from ratels to humans, entering a cooperative relationship with them.
Baffin Island. The Eskimo dogs on the ice are almost always accompanied by ravens.
TWENTY-ONE
Tulugaq
SITTING WITH A CUP OF COFFEE after arriving early at the Montreal Dorval airport, I waited to catch a flight north to Iqaluit, a community of about four thousand people on Baffin Island at the edge of Frobisher Bay, just west of Greenland and north of Hudson Bay.
The Boeing 727-200 that I’d be flying on had only six seats of passenger space. Most of the plane was crammed with cargo. Not a good sign. I had imagined a life of hunters, not people eating imported bread and potatoes. Subsistence these days does not come off the tundra. If ravens live off people, they’d be living off the same lifeline via the airline, not from what hunters provide from the land.
As we popped through the low clouds for a brief stop at Kuujjuaq, I was stunned by the sight. I saw pure white in all directions. The landscape was studded with black spruce trees, willow thickets, and larch. Soon after continuing on to Iqaluit, I saw no more trees. For an hour, I saw only blinding white. Then the outlines of the tiny settlement appeared. Iqaluit at last. Stepping out into minus 21 degrees Fahrenheit in a light snowstorm, I immediately saw ravens flying in twos and threes against the white sky that blended with sea and land. Ravens stood out, crisp and clear. I could recognize their calls as raven in an instant, but they spoke a different dialect than the one I was used to. From then on, I heard sounds or nuances of calls almost every day that I had never heard before.
After Lyn Peplinski, the director of the Iqaluit Research Center, had shown me my berth for the next few days at the Center, I immediately left to walk along what I presumed to be the Frobisher Bay shoreline. A man was shoveling snow out of a boat. Jokingly, I asked him if he was going out for a ride. “Not till early July,” he told me. “But the shoveling is something to do on a Sunday afternoon.” We exchanged names. Kalingu Sataa, a carver of stone figurines, soon talked about seal hunting, ravens, and stone-carving. “Do they sell fur parkas here?” I asked, because I had been told they are now almost impossible to buy.
“My parents, who live in the house over there, have a caribou parka,” he said. “My mother made it years ago. She might sell it.”
We walked to the house just across the street, and I met a smiling elderly couple, Kalingu’s parents, and Naudlak, his sister. Kalingu’s father, Akaka, had been born in an igloo, and lived in Iqaluit most of his life, as had Kalingu himself, who was perhaps forty years old. Arctic explorers Freuchen and Salomsen had written that Eskimos believe ravens show them the presence of bears and caribou by their flight, and conversely, that ravens follow hunting parties, as they follow polar bear. I asked if ravens ever show hunters where animals are, so that the animals would be killed and the ravens could feed. Like most elderly Inuit and young preschool children, Akaka spoke no English, so Kalingu translated: “Yes, by dipping their wings.” That was what I had long wondered about and had come to see.
Anyone who has watched ravens will have noticed them flying along, pulling in one wing, then righting themselves again. Do Inuit really believe that means the raven is talking to them? Kalingu was ambivalent, saying it was “just something that you learn when you grow up Inuit.” Then he was quiet. Eventually, he said that these days people don’t watch or notice ravens very much anymore. They watched them much more closely in the old days, when the tuktu, the caribou, were more scarce. In those days, they had no guns and they could get to hunt the tuktu only after long dog-sled travel. For 4,500 years in this land, hunting was the ultimate skill. Hunting required keen senses, guile, knowledge, strength, and endurance. When stalking caribou, hunters often took off all their clothes so that they would not rustle as they crept to within spearing distance. I presumed that was in the summer, because the March subzero temperatures were not conducive even to wearing traditional western clothing. I was freezing.
Returning to the topic of parkas, Akaka asked if I wanted to see his. His wife brought it from cold storage outside. It was a beautiful piece she had made out of light-colored caribou fur for the back and front, and dark-colored fur for the shoulders. Its hood was trimmed with wolf fur. He said he would not likely ever wear it again, and he sold it to me for $150 Canadian. That parka would make a big difference, perhaps the difference, just a few days later in Igloolik on an island in the Foxe Basin, the third and last settlement I would visit. I would accompany Charlie Uttak and several of his friends there on a several-day-long caribou hunt and Arctic char ice fishing expedition some 100 kilometers from the village. It would be an unforgettable ride at 50 kilometers an hour in minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, swerving around frozen-in blocks of sea ice, hanging on to sealskin thongs on a sledge, the qamutiik (or komatik), pulled by a Yamaha snowmobile.
The ravens were all over Iqaluit. They were perched on power poles, on roofs and on back porches of residences, and on commercial buildings with people coming and going. I watched about twenty of them loitering at a day-care center where people were walking in and out with their kids. Nobody paid them any attention. Ravens were in practically every backyard where dogs were tied up. Dozens of ravens congregated on the ice with groups of Eskimo dogs. Almost anywhere, at any one moment, I could see ravens perched or flying about. Most were vocal. On many street corners, I saw lone ravens sitting on power poles, absorbed in elaborate monologues as if exercising their varied repertoires. At the same time, they expressed a lively variety of body postures. It looked like play, because there was usually no visible audience of other ravens to whom they could have been “talking.” It would be stretching to speak of raven “calls,” because the birds were stringing together series of very different sounds into often unique sequences. It was easy to imagine that the birds were talking to each other or to themselves.
As the visiting “raven man,” I was invited for an interview at the CBC station with Gail Whitesides as host. She introduced the interview with a song about the northern raven. After the interview, the station switchboard lit up with people offering anecdotes and raven call imitations. By far the greatest number of anecdotes I heard were about ravens’ play. The ravens use power lines as their toys, hanging upside down, swinging up, and somersaulting over. They sometimes hang from them with their bills. Sliding down roofs is another pastime. One woman told me of watching a group of ravens take turns rolling down her roof. As they got to the bottom edge of the roof, they either walked or flew back up to roll down again.
The next most talked-about aspect of the town’s clowns, the ravens, was their feeding antics. “Ravens eat anything,” which makes them disgusting to some people. A large congregation of them surrounding the sled dogs on the ice left not one dog scat in sight. If they cannot intercept enough food at the front end of the dog, they get it eventually at the other end. Feeding at the dog’s front is preferred, but it is more dangerous, although ravens can reduce the risk by working in teams of two or three. Without carnivores, the ravens would here starve, even though out on the open land, I was told, ravens occasionally chase down and kill ptarmigan. Overall, the carnivores, especially humans, provide them with most of their food, and beyond the town on the tundra, ravens were scarce.
People who had been to many different towns in the north all agreed that ravens from the western towns, such as Inuvik and Yellowknife, were “totally different” from those of Iqaluit. The Iqaluit ravens still have the decorum to keep out of your way. In Inuvik and Yellowknife, they are “totally fearless,” “cheeky,” and “they will scream at you if you get between them and a garbage can.” “They
’ve even landed on top of my dog!” someone told me. Some people hope to scare them off by setting up plastic great horned owls, but one man who had tried this told me, “They act as if they are thinking: ‘Is this a fake owl intended to scare us off? Good, it’s a great perch to sit on, so there!’”
Hall Beach, the next hamlet I visited, is a mostly Inuit community of about five hundred people, where two DEW (Distant Early Warning) radar towers dominate the landscape. They were built in the 1950s to alert us to Russian nuclear-tipped missiles coming over the North Pole, but now have other uses. I’d seen an active raven nest on the DEW tower at Barrow, Alaska. Mike Wesno, who teaches at the Hall Beach school, picked me up at the tiny airport next to the towers with his snowmobile. It was dusk, and minus 30 degrees. Would I like to go for a spin? Indeed. After dropping off my gear at his house, we took a frigid evening ride out to the towers. At least a hundred ravens were perched all over the high steel girders, and the birds were not huddling together, as I expected at these low temperatures and howling wind. This site was a nocturnal communal roost, not a nesting site. Suitable sites for communal roosting must be few and far between on the tundra, and DEW towers suffice for both.
Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds Page 28