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

by Bernd Heinrich

  The next morning, I awoke to the Eskimo dogs’ mournful howls all around the village. As in Iqaluit, the dogs were tied without shelter below the houses on the sea ice. Curled into balls with their backs to the wind, the dogs looked at me with one eye over their furry tails tucked around them as I walked by. They were all well attended by retinues of ravens. I noticed one raven, whom I called “Scraggly Tail,” loitering around a particular dog pack for several days in a row.

  The few ravens that foraged at the edge of this town were much shyer than those at Iqaluit. Nor did they here subsist on garbage; the dozens of plastic garbage bags along the street were not ripped open as they lay there for at least three days. Most of the ravens were getting their food elsewhere. I presumed it was beyond the ice flow edge, where tidal currents maintain open water and where there is drifting, or pack, ice. It is the seal and walrus hunting ground of the polar bears and Inuit.

  Jona, one of Mike’s Inuit students, graciously offered to take me on his dogsled out across the half mile of solid sea ice up to that flow edge. The dogs plodded across the blinding white snow as we left the frozen shoreline at the edge of the village. Jumbles of almost translucent turquoise ice-blocks were frozen in place, and we wound our way around them until we came to the edge. The water flowed by, silent and black, like oil. It was eerie.

  The water was covered with tiny loose ice crystals. A seal popped up, looked at me, and quickly submerged. In the distance, I saw faint white ghostlike outlines of drifting ice floes. This was the world of polar bears, walrus hunters, and ravens. I realized why nobody had seemed anxious to take a newcomer out in an unsteady boat with the lethal combination of minus 30 degree temperatures, dark drifting water, and fog.

  We loitered awhile, examining an igloo and the bloody trail where a seal had been dragged on the snow. After returning to the village, I felt a strange tug to walk back. This time out at the edge, I saw two ravens ahead of me perched on an ice block. One flew off, veered toward me, and made a wide loop back toward the flow edge where I had just seen the seal. It then rejoined its companion, again perching on the ice block it had just left. If I had been a hunter, I might have interpreted the raven’s behavior as a sign beckoning me to go in the direction of the flow edge. I would have then approached this seal. But had I gone in another direction, I may also have found another one.

  Both ravens lifted off from their perch when I came near them. The sun was already low on the horizon, and in liquid, sliding wing strokes they swung toward the village where the dogs lay curled on the ice, then disappeared as black dots on the horizon toward the DEW tower.

  In the afternoon, I gave another presentation on Maine ravens at the school. Afterward, Mike and his wife Ina and about a dozen of the high school students and I went to the dump, where we found six ravens. There was not much raven food beyond one grotesquely burned dog sticking out of the snow and one iqumaq with some meat still remaining inside. Iqumaqs are “sausages” about four feet long and one foot thick that are made by sewing walrus hide together to enclose raw walrus meat and fat. They are buried in the ground on permafrost to be stored for many months and to ferment until they acquire the proper flavor.

  Near 3:00 P.M., we saw many ravens returning to the DEW tower from the distant ice pack. When the seal and walrus hunting is good, the bears eat only the fat, leaving the rest of the carcass. The ravens and perhaps Artic foxes finish the rest. An old hunter, Noah Piugaattuq, whom I met in the village, explained to me that scavenging ravens are noisy, and polar bears will become used to their calls. Polar bears sometimes feed on dead marine animals that ravens find first, and the bears are attracted by the raven’s calls. When hearing ravens’ cries at food, bears without a kill to feed from often become distracted or attracted. Inuit hunters therefore imitate raven calls as a technique to get closer to a bear.

  I wished I could have stayed longer at that sea hunter’s village, but I had to catch my flight to Igloolik. While waiting for the plane in the afternoon, when the sun was still 10 degrees above the horizon, I watched the ravens sky-dance over the DEW towers. They had come back to their roost at least four hours before sundown. They played in twos and threes, repeating violent chasing flights that took them high into the sky. They dove and tumbled down over and over again. The walrus hunters had probably been successful; these ravens were well fed.

  No raven had wing-tipped to me so far to indicate potential prey, as Akaka Sataa at Iqaluit had talked about. Akaka had also told me that an incantation was required by the hunter to elicit wing-tipping, and the magic words to address the raven were not given away to just anyone. In the old days, the incantation was bought from the shaman, because the magic words were very valuable. Abe Okpik, an elderly man of Iqaluit who was no longer a hunter, and whose uncle was named none other than Tulugaq (raven), later had told me that when out on the land hunting caribou, or out on the ice hunting polar bear, a hunter seeing a raven fly over used to look up to it and call its name loudly three times: “Tulugaq, tulugaq, tulugaq.” Having the bird’s attention, he would then yell to it, telling it to tumble out of the sky in the direction of the prey. If the raven gave its musical gong-like call three times in succession, then the hunters went in that direction and killed it. “They believed in the raven strongly, and followed it,” said Okpik. “And after they killed the caribou or the polar bear, they always left the raven the choicest tidbits of meat as a reward.” It seemed absurd to me that a hunter could signal to a bird, and the bird would in turn provide information asked of it. Yet I wanted to keep an open mind to the possibility of communication.

  The wing-tipping behavior is unique to ravens. Anyone who watches free-flying ravens anywhere will eventually see a raven “tumbling out of the sky” and simultaneously tipping (or tucking in) just one wing that tilts the body to the side. In Yellowstone Park in late January, we saw this behavior, especially in ravens flying in pairs. I saw one raven dip its right wing five separate times, each time accompanied by a metallic, two-note gong-like call that may very well have been the call to which the Inuit referred. I have seen the wing-tipping in Maine in birds near a kill, when they were presumably well fed and “feeling their oats.” The three-note gong-like call is also common, although I don’t know its meaning. My friend Glenn Booma, who mimics it perfectly, says it almost invariably attracts nearby ravens. Could it indeed be an attractant call meant for other ravens that is then given to humans with the same intention? Could the wing-tilting and the call logically be connected with prey and with hunters in the Arctic?

  Visibility in the Arctic landscape extends for many miles in all directions. There is little that is man- or caribou-size that could remain hidden from the view of a raven flying above the low hills. A hundred or so years ago, and thousands of years before that, the only humans walking on the Arctic landscape would have been hunters after prey, and the raven needed them to survive. Given that situation, a raven would make the connection between humans, caribou, and food in a flash. But could a raven communicate location?

  A hungry or starving raven who knows that the proximity of humans with caribou means a meal would likely have felt exuberant on seeing human hunters when caribou were grazing nearby. Knowing that caribou were potential food, it might have learned that caribou in combination with people is food. In one plausible scenario in the evolution of communication between ravens and human hunters, one can envision a hungry raven feeling exuberant when flying over humans and seeing a herd of caribou on the horizon at the same time. As do other exuberant ravens, it may have tipped a wing as an expression of its emotion, then continued on toward the caribou to wait for the expected feast. After all, whenever it had seen humans and caribou before, it always later found entrails and other fresh meat.

  The hunters could have learned as well. They would have learned that the appearance of a raven or ravens meant that large mammals were near. It would have been a small step for humans to presume that if the signaling raven flew to where they could not see, such a
s over a hill, that the potential prey would be there also. They would have felt the raven’s signal had been intentional. Subsequently, hunters seeing a raven flying by might wonder if it had seen them, hoping the bird would again guide them. “Tulugaq, tulugaq,” they would shout to get its attention. If it did not see caribou from up high, the raven may have had less cause for jubilation. Perhaps it simply flew on without giving any acknowledgment, and the hunter would not have followed it. Since a raven can live longer than a half century, there may have been specific individual ravens that learned the tricks of the trade of hunting with humans, and vice versa, and they could pass it on to others in a mutually reinforcing cycle that could end up resembling the well-known honeyguide example in Africa, where a bird routinely leads people to beehives full of honey.

  What seems less logical to me is that the raven would tip its wing precisely in the direction of the game. It may have been that hunters were directed to game regardless of what direction they thought the raven had tipped its wing. Being alerted, they would start to look harder or perhaps travel farther. Caribou are often spread out in more than one direction. A hunter would have been led to game even if he went south, for example, over a rise from which he had a vantage point to see caribou towards the east. In either case, the hunter who believed would have been more successful than one who did not, and the price he had paid for the magic words would have been worth it. As a hunter myself, I know that conviction promotes action, and only action can produce success.

  The practice of following ravens must once have been common, because it has inspired humorous Eskimo tales. I presume any truly humorous tale must have a highly serious antithesis. In “The Raven and the Hunter” tale, a raven tells a hunter who wants to settle near some seal breathing holes he has found precisely where to camp. The hunter foolishly heeds the raven and camps where directed. There in the night he is killed by a boulder falling from the mountain above. The raven then flies down and pecks out the hunter’s eyes, saying, “I don’t know why all these hunters believe my silly stories.”

  Raven making a hole in the snow into which it will cache the meat it has temporarily placed onto the snow.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Caching, Cache-Raiding, and Deception

  EVEN A PARTIALLY EATEN MOOSE OR elk carcass is a huge food bonanza for a raven, but that is not a guarantee for a continuous food supply. The bird may then face days or weeks without food, since any one carcass is usually ephemeral due to competitors ranging from bacteria to carnivores. There is great advantage to hoarding food for future use. Food caching by animals often looks as if it involves conscious planning, though it need not be conscious behavior. For example, bees make and store honey for use months in advance, even building elaborate receptacles of wax for this food. But these are largely programmed, inflexible responses.

  What might a raven’s caching behavior look like if the bird were consciously aware? Overall, a conscious bird should take into account various consequences of its behavior in a continually changing scenario, not just proceed according to a script. For example, it might respond to others’ activity. If it found competitors at a carcass, the cognizant raven would hurry its pace. It would decide whether to feed and then cache, or cache and then feed. It would decide whether to fly off with each piece of food that it removed from the larger chunk, or to wait until several chunks were removed that could be carried all at once. With the latter strategy, there would be the question of putting pieces temporarily to the side to be picked up later before departing. This option would only be taken if no other ravens that would take it were near. If others were near, the cacher would leave immediately after tearing off a large chunk, or collect small chunks and store them safely in the gular sac of its throat. When ready to depart with the meat, the conscious bird would already have picked a general destination. If many birds were near, it would fly far away. If it saw others nearby who were uninterested in food, it could simply walk a few paces and then hide the food. If others were interested in its food, which it would determine from watching their behavior, then it would fly far out of their sight before caching. If after flying far away, it found another raven, it would fly off again and try to find another secluded place. After caching its packet of food, it might return to the carcass and see another bird caching. It would watch intently from hiding and wait until the cacher flew away, then fly over to that site. Before it recovered the others’ cache, the original cacher (who saw the presumptive cache thief fly in the direction of its cache) would fly at the cache-robber and chase it off, provided the cache-robber was a weak bird.

  What does the raven’s actual, as opposed to hypothetical, caching behavior look like? Take Goliath. Like most other ravens, he would cache surplus food if he had recently experienced a shortage. But caching, to him, involved much more than just hoarding. During one observation, I saw him grab two pieces of meat and fly into the side aviary behind a big rock. He put down both pieces of meat, dug a hole in the dirt, then shoved one piece of meat in, walked a few steps to pick up leaves, and brought them back to cover the meat. He then picked up the second piece of meat, flew to another spot, and repeated the process. Meanwhile, Fuzz had been perched quietly on the dead beech stump in the other aviary some one hundred feet distant, intently watching Goliath through the wire screening. A few seconds after Goliath returned to beg for more meat from me, Fuzz rushed into the side aviary and found both pieces of Goliath’s hidden meat. He ate one on the spot and recached the other for future use. That was not an isolated incident.

  On February 6, 1998, my six nine-month-old birds were all around my feet, feeding on scraps of meat. Blue, the largest male, got the biggest piece and hopped off with it to bury it deep in the snow. Then he hopped right back to get more meat. All continued to feed. Minutes later, Orange, the next-largest bird, walked toward Blue’s cache, but Blue flew over to intercept, and Orange aborted his attempted theft. Blue and Orange next both flew into the other aviary, out of sight of the other birds. White, a small female, immediately walked toward the site of Blue’s cached meat. She dug at the precise spot in the snow where Blue had cached the chunk of meat, pulled it out, and cached it elsewhere. A minute or so later, Orange came back, leaving Blue in the other aviary. With Blue safely out of sight, he went to Blue’s cache a second time. He dug. Of course, he found nothing because White had already raided it. I have never seen a bird go back to a site from which it had removed food or seen another remove its food. It was comical to watch Orange. He looked again and again at the other’s empty cache site, much as I had done looking for a radio transmitter (see Chapter 6), as if in genuine disbelief to find that Blue’s food was gone when he knew Blue could not have taken it. He didn’t realize that White had taken it instead.

  As long as I kept giving each bird pieces of meat, there was little reason, or time, for any of them to do much cache-raiding. To see more of what was involved in this intriguing behavior, I needed to provide more motivation for it. I started by cutting two red squirrels into twenty approximately equal pieces, and I allowed only three birds into the experimental aviary: Orange, the next-to-dominant bird of the six, and Red and White, the two most subordinate ones. I showed all the pieces I had in my hands, then I started handing out the pieces one at a time, but only to Orange. Since a raven takes all it can get, especially if that means getting food away from others, he cached each piece as quickly as he could and instantly came back to me for the next piece. Orange was very dominant over Red and White, so he had less reason than a subordinate bird to hide his caches. He made the first ones in plain sight, as Red and White watched from a perch nearby. Red was brave and flew down to dig the first piece out of the snow, and she managed to get it (or Orange allowed her to get it). But then Orange chased Red twice around the aviary until she dropped the meat. Her cache steals and the subsequent chases occurred several more times, and each time she ended up empty-billed despite her thefts. Finally, whenever Red dug up a cache, she would drop the meat without even
bothering to fly off with it when Orange approached. White also ventured to steal a couple of caches and was also violently chased until she dropped the stolen meats.

  After Orange had made about a dozen caches, he occasionally stopped to feed. While he was bent over picking on a piece of meat, Red and White unerringly went directly to his buried caches, pulling out his cached meat, and feeding as well. When Orange noticed their thefts, he again gave chase, even while picking up and carrying along the piece he had last been feeding on. Ultimately, he could not hide or control his twenty caches all at once within the confines of the aviary, and both Red and White got to feed.

  Next, I threw in new variables. I let in the other half of this raven group, Blue, Green, and Yellow, and I gave them a calf head. Blue was the most dominant bird of the six, and he fed by standing on top of the food, as is the dining etiquette among ravens. Blue focused on trying to extricate the calf’s eye, while all the others except for Orange fed amply on the calf meat. The eye was extremely difficult to dislodge, and Blue worked more than ten minutes at this task. All this time, Orange sat watching at the sidelines, undoubtedly digesting a stomach full of squirrel meat. Being the next in line in the dominance hierarchy just below Blue, Orange was always the main object of Blue’s aggression at food. Orange held back and waited. During the moment that Blue was pulling the eye free, when I (and probably Orange) knew he’d fly off to cache it, Orange flew off his perch and landed on the calf head and started tearing at the meat. As Blue spent more than two minutes walking and looking for a place to cache the eye, Orange had two minutes of feeding time. Having finally cached the eye, Blue returned to resume feeding at the calf head, and Orange left it. Several minutes later, I happened to see White, the most subordinate bird of the group, fly by me into the other aviary, carrying the calf eye in her bill. She had found Blue’s cache.