Life Everlasting

by Bernd Heinrich

  We must make do with what we have, and for me Maine is not a bad choice for a compromise of viewing and doing. It has wild woods with populations of moose, deer, and black bear, and in the last half-century, wolflike canids have returned. Ravens, the premier northern undertakers, have come back as well, because the coyotes provide the link for their survival. The coyotes open the winter-weakened and dead deer, allowing the ravens to find food in the winter, when they need to start nesting in order to have time to raise their young to self-sufficiency in a year. I love these woods. I am comfortable with them, because they are sure to outlive me, and hence so are the coyotes, the deer, and the ravens as well.

  I have lived with the ravens to try to understand them, and that has meant attracting and sometimes taming them for close observation. By far the largest number of deer, moose, and other creatures wild and domesticated whose fate I and colleagues have observed in Maine’s winter woods were eaten by ravens. And we still have some old raven friends who have been our guides to raven communication and other behaviors over a span of a couple of decades. Edgar Allan Poe writes in his famous poem:

  . . . I betook myself to linking

  Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—

  What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore

  Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

  Obviously Poe, describing a raven “on his chamber door,” had never met one of these birds, or his had perched on his chamber door a bit too long.

  IT’S A TYPICAL late fall day, mid-November, in 2010. I’m at camp with my nephew hunting (but not necessarily finding, much less shooting) deer. Other friends are with us, and without all of them the days would not be nearly as cheerfully satisfying as they are. My two raven friends, Goliath and Whitefeather, are in attendance too, or at least I think they are—I can no longer positively identify them. That really doesn’t matter, because if one or the other of this pair has been replaced over the last twenty years, the new bird is as worthy as the original. I have known many ravens and never met one I didn’t like.

  I raised Goliath from a chick in the spring of 1993. Like other baby ravens, he appeared chubby. When ready to fledge, baby ravens weigh as much as adults, but their wing and tail feathers are still quite short. Goliath was clumsy, and before he could fly he waddled in a way that might pass as a swagger, were it not for the soft and endearingly purring sounds he made when I scratched his head and he closed his eyes. He and his nest mates were later the subjects of many tests of intelligence in my aviary, solving puzzles such as stacking corn chips, carrying multiple doughnuts at once, and reaching salami suspended from a long string. There were also tests of food-caching behavior involving memory and anticipation of competitors’ responses.

  After Goliath grew up, he was the epitome of power and grace, as all ravens are. As his long wings sliced the air, each wing beat made a whooshing-ripping sound. Cruising at forty miles an hour on the level, he made red-tailed and broad-winged hawks look like amateur flyers; at times he would fly high into the sky and soar like an eagle on outstretched wings. Ravens are a species that can have it “both ways”—if not many ways—on the wing.

  When Goliath was three years old, he was with a group of about twenty wild ravens in my Maine aviary, and he and a female from the group struck up an immediate friendship. Seeing this relationship between him and the female, Whitefeather, I gave them one section of the aviary as their own (the aviary had three sections, totaling some 400,000 square meters, built into my woods). Their section contained a shed about three meters off the ground attached under the crown of a thick spruce, simulating the roofed-over cliff cavities that ravens like to nest in. In 1996 they built a nest in that shed.

  Whitefeather laid four eggs in their nest, and the pair raised two chicks as well as adopting four that I added (the offspring of Houdi, from my Vermont aviary, who had abandoned her young). I then tore out a side of the Maine aviary so that Goliath and Whitefeather would have access to the outside and be able to find some of the food for their young. The pair foraged on their own in the Maine forests, although Goliath was ever ready for handouts for some time, until after the young fledged. In later years, after 1996, I was living in Vermont but would go to visit the ravens on many occasions. Whenever I came near their territory, I called Goliath by name, and he would answer from the nearby forest, fly out to greet me, and accept the treats I brought him. In the summers, when my wife in those days accompanied me and we cooked our meals over an open fire next to the cabin, he usually perched in a big dead birch tree next to our grill. His mate remained reticent, hanging back out of sight in the nearby pine grove, although she sometimes called from there.

  As Goliath got older and had less and less contact with us, he became more independent. I could not take him to Vermont, where I was teaching at the state university in Burlington, because he had not grown up with other people and, encountering them for the first time, would likely meet an untimely end. But I continued to visit him at regular intervals, and I always left him food. He was becoming a hunter. I found blue jay feathers and the remains of a gray squirrel under the red maple tree by the aviary, where he often perched. I presumed he was finding his own food and was no longer relying on my handouts.

  One year Goliath apparently become frustrated, perhaps even angry at me for a longer than usual absence. On occasion he had been inside the cabin with me. Perhaps he thought I was inside and was refusing to come out to feed him, though of course I have no idea what he was thinking. But I do know what he did: when I came back to the cabin, I found a lot of the chinking between the logs pulled out, although Goliath had never taken a fiber of it before. He had also visited the outhouse, where he had taken a roll of toilet paper, unrolled it, and left tatters all around in the trees and on the ground. After that he never again came to me. For all practical purposes, he might as well have left, and I thought he had.

  I was absent from Maine most of the fall of 1997, when Goliath was four years old, and when I did go there I saw neither Goliath nor Whitefeather. However, I returned right after New Year’s in 1998 (the winter of the great ice storm in Maine) to meet with my winter ecology class a few days later. I saw no ravens for almost two weeks, but on January 10, as we were about to leave, the pair suddenly arrived as if out of nowhere. I was greatly surprised to see them. They were both making a big racket at the aviary and inside the shed where they had nested.

  They were getting ready to nest again. Like other male ravens, Goliath wanted to return to a nest site that had proven successful. He entered the aviary repeatedly to inspect their old nest. She, however, refused to enter. I had not seen him for eight months, and he seemed uninterested in me, but he was willing to perch directly above me on his favorite perch in the red maple, where he had occasionally left scraps of uneaten squirrel. He kept insisting on returning to the nest, and she kept resisting. Finally, in April, very late for local nesting, they “compromised” and built their nest high in a nearby large pine tree; on May 8 she was incubating the eggs—at a time when most other local ravens have ready-to-fledge young. After I left two white chicken eggs on a stump under their nest tree, I heard them make a big vocal commotion, and then they seemed to vanish, abandoning their nest; I didn’t see them for two days. Eggs are a favorite treat of ravens, but they don’t normally find them lying out on a stump. I don’t know what they thought about the eggs, but it apparently led them to reject their nest.

  I climbed up to the nest and found their four eggs covered with the nest lining of moss and deer hair. The ravens never returned. This was very unusual. I have examined dozens of raven nests containing eggs, and in no other case was a nest abandoned, even after I had inspected it repeatedly and even after I added chicken eggs of natural color or painted bright red or green as well as flashlight batteries, potatoes, or rocks; all my additions were accepted and incubated. I have no idea why my estranged (from me) pair left their nest immediately after my generous offering, wher
eas a wild pair would not have done so. At one time Goliath had expected me to be a continual food provider, and after I abruptly stopped provisioning him, he savaged my house and abandoned me. A raven never forgets; it seemed I was now worse than a thief. When I suddenly offered them the one delicacy they desired most, perhaps they thought it a trap—I could only be up to no good.

  A mated pair of common ravens, Corvus corax, in portrait and while preening each other; the birds form lifelong pairs.

  I was afraid the birds would now leave their territory. However, although they did not nest that year, they apparently settled their “argument” (or there was a divorce), because most years since then they (or another pair) have nested in the same pines, always starting early in the season and finishing the job.

  Disagreements between a mated raven pair may not be unique. Near my home in Vermont the local pair built their nest in 2009 on a small cliff, but a predator got the young shortly after they feathered out. The next spring the pair started a nest there again, but after it was half constructed they abandoned it and built another to completion in a nearby pine tree. There they successfully raised a brood. In the spring of 2011, they built a partial nest on the same branches of the pine tree, then abandoned it and rebuilt a second nest on the old cliff site, from which they later fledged their brood.

  ON THIS NOVEMBER day in 2010, I hear the raven pair call from their sleeping (and nesting) place in the pines near my Maine cabin at dawn, as they do almost every day year-round. I cannot tell which one is saying what, but they often go through a repertoire of several different kinds of calls, and after several minutes of “conversation,” they take wing, flying either together or separately. In the evening they return. I never know where they have been, but when I am out in the nearby forest during the day I almost always hear raven calls from somewhere; sometimes a single bird flies over, sometimes a pair. I never recognize them, but one could be Goliath or Whitefeather. (The colored plastic ring that Goliath once wore has certainly by now worn through and fallen off. Whitefeather’s wing tag was attached by a metal rivet, and the cold metal caused a nearby feather to grow back white; after the tag was lost, the feather, replaced in the next molt, may have returned to its original color.)

  Today Charlie and I hope to be able to leave them something—namely, the entrails of a deer, if we can get one. Two years ago, when we were successful on the hunt, we left a gut pile about a half-kilometer from the cabin, and ravens were on it within an hour. Today, as I’m perched with my rifle high in a spruce tree at 7 A.M., I hear the swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of a raven’s powerful wing strokes. No other bird that I know makes such a sound, one evincing such physical power. The bird flew directly over me, showing no sign of recognition. It flew on and then stopped nearby; for the next half-hour I heard a continuous monologue of quarks and gurgles in all sorts of cadences, pitches, and intonations. This raven “song” consisted of bell-like sounds and a happy-sounding, high-pitched gurgling trill that I had heard before when I’d left them an attractive carcass, such as that of a deer. I didn’t know if the bird was happy, but I was certain it was not depressed—it was perhaps anticipating great meals. I wondered if the raven had spied a deer or moose and, given the hunters’ (our) presence, associated it with food. If so, the mere expression of its joy could have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, provided that a nearby hunter knows a raven is happy and makes these sounds when it sees a deer or other potential food.

  The ravens’ music continued for twenty minutes, until Charlie joined me as we had planned.

  “Did you hear the raven?” I asked.

  “Sure did. I went right by there, and I also saw a very fresh deer track near there.” A half-hour later we got our deer.

  The raven’s calling is not likely a conscious act “to” accomplish an objective. As much as I think the songs of the thrush, warbler, and finch are expressions of joy and vigor, I “know” also that they function “to” attract a mate, “to” proclaim a territory, and “to” repel rivals. Unfortunately, such knowledge, which allows me to assign specific functions to the calls, lends these animals a somewhat mechanical aspect in my own mind. Yet in the raven, it is not necessarily objective to make such interpretations.

  What I had heard was like a jazz improvisation, but not by just one instrument. It sounded like a medley of many voices. The raven seemed to be having fun. I can’t think of a cheerier bird song, except possibly that of the winter wren. But if the wren is singing for fun, it’s fun for only a short time in the spring, just before nesting. The raven sings, though rarely, at any time of the year. It is play.

  Play is a raven characteristic. And play is an expression of “pure” joy. It does not require a reward other than the doing of it. You see it also in the raven’s flight. At all times of the year, you can see a single raven flying along steadily in a straight line, as though it has a destination, and I presume it does. The bird, apparently absorbed in some monologue of gurgling or other calls, may suddenly tuck one wing to the side and tumble down like a black bomb in a corkscrew dive, catching itself a couple of seconds later with an outstretched wing, only to vault back up and continue its straight flight just as before. It looks like plain exuberance. And this behavior usually has no raven audience.

  I do not know what a raven’s “spirit” is. But if I had to choose this bird’s defining characteristic, it would be the opposite in many ways of what has been depicted in popular culture. Far from being “ghastly” and “grim” à la Poe, ravens are the cheeriest birds on earth, especially near a potential feast, and what’s more, they perform sky burial most joyfully. If I could choose, I’d be reincarnated into the raven.

  Ravens are, or at least were, arguably the most important carcass consumers in the Northern Hemisphere. They are the premier carcass specialists of the crow family (magpies in winter may be the second), although they cannot feed on a carcass until the mammals with sharp cutting teeth have opened it. Normally the mammals come first to winter-killed animals, and the ravens follow. In fieldwork in the Maine woods, my postdoc John Marzluff and I found that ravens disposed not only of moose and deer but also of about two hundred stillborn calves, numerous goats, sheep, cows, and horses, and all sorts of roadkill, from raccoons to porcupines.

  Ravens feeding at an elk carcass along with the carcass openers, their providers.

  We never saw large numbers of ravens except at carcasses or near communal roosts whose members slept at night and then fed at nearby carcasses the next day. When we did see numerous ravens at one time there were usually less than fifty. However, after we wing-tagged more than four hundred so that we could identify individuals, we saw that there was an almost continual turnover of birds at any one carcass.

  IN THE WINTER, when the ground is stone-hard from frost, the insect undertakers are inactive and the winter crew of warm-blooded animals, mainly coyotes, cats, foxes, and ravens, come in as their substitute. The cold meat stays fresh, so it can be a prized resource potentially for months, and the longer it is available the more birds it seems to attract. I once obtained two full-size skinned Holstein cows, each weighing about a ton. I wanted to find out if it was physically possible to satisfy the ravens’ appetites and perhaps overwhelm their capacity to devour a carcass. From the numbered and colored wing tags of individuals that could be identified, and then from the number of these marked ravens that came to the feast, I was able to calculate the total number that fed there: close to five hundred individuals. In two weeks the ravens had removed almost all the meat from the two cows. That does not mean, though, that they had eaten it all—far from it.

  To counter the rapid depletion of the carcass, the birds try to haul away as much as they can to cache for future use. They fly off with a load of meat, land on the snow or ground, lay the food down, then use their bill to excavate a small hole They put the meat into the hole and cover it with snow or nearby debris, then quickly fly back to get another load to hide somewhere else.

  Since this is winter wo
rk, and the carcass is often frozen rock-solid, it takes much time and effort to chip off meat. In subzero temperatures, getting the meat off the carcass can take as much energy as the meat itself supplies, so the birds try to steal from others by watching where they make their caches. As a counterstrategy to that strategy, the cache makers remove themselves far from the sight of potential thieves. In Maine, at winter carcasses where a crowd of birds has gathered, streams of them fly off in all directions making caches. Unless the carcass is defended and used by only a mated pair, the birds usually fly a kilometer or more to make each cache. Each bird makes lots of them, one after another. They need to, because much of the meat will be found by those from whom it can’t be hidden, namely, the mammals who hunt by scent. I suspect that canids such as coyotes, who are afraid to approach carcasses tainted with human scent, may rely on the ravens’ caches, in a kind of quid pro quo for having provided initial access to it.

  In Vermont I have built a platform about ten feet off the ground as my raven feeder. All roadkills and kitchen scraps go onto it, and a local raven pair now “own” it. I believe our dog, a yellow retriever named Hugo, thinks the ravens are his providers, because he often rushes down to my “raven restaurant” after he has watched through the window as they arrive. He occasionally finds a scrap of food they have dropped. He also robs their nearby caches.