Penelope, that Homeric ideal of faithfulness, never cheated on Odysseus during his two-decade absence from home. She pined with loneliness, but stayed true in her body and her heart. Odysseus himself achieved no such spousal fidelity—remember the temptress Circe? We might playfully suggest that Homer, in creating a long-loyal woman and a philandering man, anticipated modern-day pop-psychology stereotypes (the man strays, the woman stays). But despite his adultery, no one thinks to question Odysseus’s love for Penelope. For all our ideals about monogamy, we recognize that the death of an exclusive sexual bond need not mean the death of intense love.
Lest it seem that I’ve gone a little over the top in linking storks with Greek epics, consider that Bernd Heinrich, for one, doesn’t shy away from attributing “love” to birds—or “grief,” for that matter. He tells the story of Ruth O’Leary, an elderly woman from Idaho, who has had markedly close emotional ties with individual Canada geese. One goose, named Tinker Belle or TB, had been her companion for two years, even sleeping in Ruth’s bed at night. At one point, TB flew off with a mate, and O’Leary felt sure she’d never see TB again. However, the next year, as she worked in her garden in the company of a young gosling, TB appeared suddenly with her mate.
Unsurprisingly, the gander hung back from human contact. TB, on the other hand, stepped right up into Ruth’s lap, then followed her into the house, where she walked from room to room. In the bedroom, she pulled covers off the bed, perhaps assessing the best place to make a nest. In the living room, she pulled a videocassette off the shelf and looked directly at the television, which she and Ruth had watched together in the past. “Ruth,” Heinrich writes, “took the correct tape, Fly Away Home, off the shelf and put it in the videocassette recorder. Tinker Belle leaped up onto the couch and watched more than half the movie—one she had watched often before.” That evening, TB rejoined her mate in flight. A pattern was thus established. The goose pair would show up at Ruth’s in the morning, TB would spend the day with Ruth, and the birds would fly off in the evening. Then one day, the gander was nowhere to be seen. For three days, TB flew around the area, calling and calling for her mate. After that, she sat with her bill under her wing and refused to eat. She became so weak that she staggered.
The gosling had remained at Ruth’s house throughout this period. Once TB lost her mate, Ruth made sure that she interacted with the younger bird. The two swam and ate together, and at night both slept on Ruth’s bed. Gradually, TB emerged from her sorrow and came back to her old self, eventually rejoining a wild flock. O’Leary attributes her recovery to the therapeutic effects of spending time with the younger goose. Here is an interesting echo of what happened with Willa, the cat who grieved for her lost sister Carson (as described in chapter 1), and whose spirits improved only when a younger cat came into the household.
Stories of bird affection fill Heinrich’s book. Yet it’s not as if attachment is so fixed in the birds’ genes that whenever a male goose comes within courting distance of a female, the two tumble into a sort of preprogrammed rapture. Some couplings are perfunctory, the reproductive imperative carried out in the absence of anything that looks (at least to a human eye) remotely affectionate.
By contrast, Malena and Rodan behave toward each other in ways that may further their common reproductive goals but are not necessary for successful mating. The drive to produce offspring is fixed and the result of mating is inevitable, but the sharing of affection between any two birds is anything but.
And love between long-term partners? It’s a trade-off seared in joy and pain. To love is to gain much—but also to lose when, after years and years, one is again, even if only for a while, alone.
While birds like storks, swans, and geese are linked in our minds with monogamy, the symbolic resonance of crows and ravens is more complicated. Corvids are birds of mystery and contradiction. They symbolize, on the one hand, trickery and deceit, death and doom. Yet they stand just as much for creativity, for healing and prophecy, and for the transformative power of death.
Notice how death figures on both sides of the corvids’ symbolic power, the dark and the light. How could so much opposite meaning be invested by humans in one type of bird? In Mind of the Raven, Bernd Heinrich suggests that these contrasting themes emerged at different stages of human history. Ravens were revered, he says, when we as a species were hunters. Back then, where ravens flew, landed, and feasted, large animals could be found, animals whose meat sustained our lives as well. Later, when humans settled down and began to herd domesticated animals, the raven’s association with death shifted. Now the raven became a thief, a stealer of that sustaining meat.
In some societies it was thought—as it still is by some groups—that ravens not only scavenged from animal carcasses but killed animals outright. This view is understandable, Heinrich notes; witnessing a raven plucking an eye from a dying calf would be reason enough to suspect the bird as murderous. In Yellowstone National Park in 1985, ravens were witnessed removing the eyes from a dying bison that was stuck in the mud, steam still puffing from its nostrils. It’s the ravens’ way to feast on corpses, and not only those of calves and bison. Humans too may become bird food. Historical accounts suggest that after great battles, when bodies were strewn across a field, ravens flew in to take advantage. This sort of behavior hasn’t helped their ghoulish reputation.
It would be a stretch of the imagination to attribute the death of a bison or a person to a tiny bird, but severely aggressive acts by ravens toward other, smaller animals have been recorded. In the Arctic, a pair of ravens cooperated to kill seal pups resting on the ice. One raven would swoop down and land near a pup’s ice hole. When the second bird drove the pup toward the hole, the first would peck the pup on the head until it died. Are these sorts of observations what led to the term for a social group of ravens, an “unkindness”? Still, that term is less harsh than the one for crows: a “murder.”
With the advent of herding, in Heinrich’s scheme, ravens’ association with death became tinged with doom. An anthropological view, though, suggests no simple linear chronology of hunting first and herding later, but instead a dynamic and overlapping set of subsistence behaviors that responded to environmental conditions. Given this fact, perhaps disparate cultural traditions may be a primary cause of the raven’s complex symbology. One sort of oral tradition regarding the raven may have emerged in one group, another sort in another location.
In their book In the Company of Crows and Ravens, John Marzluff and Tony Angell report a cornucopia of perspectives on corvids among Native American peoples. For Pacific Northwest native tribes, the raven may be seen as creator, clown, mischief maker, shape changer, or trickster. Some Native American groups relate a tale that explains the birds’ jet color. The Lakota Sioux say that crows were at first white. When a Lakota hunter masked as a buffalo caught the crow leader, he threw the crow into the campfire in reprisal for the warning it had issued to other animals about the impending hunt. The crow escaped but was blackened by the fire. For the Acoma Indians, the crow became black for a different fire-related reason: after the crow created the world, he rescued it from fires; dipping his wings in water to cool the burning earth, he turned black.
Underlying all this complexity is the fact that the corvids are incredibly smart and social. As a primatologist, I love that they are dubbed “the feathered apes” based on their cognitive and behavioral similarities to chimpanzees. Corvid calls are not just expressions of fear or arousal but communicate specific messages about predators, family members, and available resources. People, say Marzluff and Angell, can easily determine corvids’ emotional tenor by reading the “language” expressed through the varying arrangement of their contour feathers, an unusual communicative feature (and surely a key channel of communication among the birds themselves).
Corvids’ social groups are hotbeds of shared learning and communication, where individuals are recognized and problems are solved intelligently. Sometimes it seems the birds gath
er with the express intent of sharing information with each other. At the University of Washington, crows gather each morning at a certain parking lot next to the football stadium. Flock after flock arrives in successive landings. Marzluff and Angell note the defeaning cacophony of calls, and even they, expert ornithologists, wonder what’s going on. This parking-lot ritual has endured for forty years, with at least four generations of crows now involved. In the beginning, the location made sense in a practical way: a dump existed at the site, in which crows could scavenge for food. Now no food can be found nearby. The lot is not particularly warm, nor is it near the crows’ roosting site. Why do the birds still select this spot to gather? The crows are doing what their parents did, and their grandparents. It’s ritual now, a local tradition. The crows “regroup, catch up on the latest buzz, prepare for the day’s events, and shake the sleep out of their bones,” write Marzluff and Angell. It’s a cultural choice the crows make.
The popular theme in human myth and legend of crows’ and ravens’ close association with death, then, can be assessed from a scientific point of view against the backdrop of these birds’ social tendencies and intelligence. What we know about the feathered apes leads to a prediction that corvids may feel, and express, emotion when a flockmate dies. But do corvids really grieve? Marzluff and Angell report a curious thing that sometimes happens with crows: a loud, squawky cluster of birds, numbering in the hundreds or even thousands, gathers and stays together for about a quarter of an hour. Then there’s a period of silence, followed by a collective departure. Left behind is a single dead crow. What could that be about?
Crows tend to avoid places of danger, including locations where humans or other predators have captured flockmates in the past. If the single crow has died right in the midst of the group, perhaps the strange silence accompanies a process by which the survivors fix in their minds a place to avoid in the future. But could something more emotional be going on, like a crow funeral?
A controlled experiment might help with this question. Marzluff and Angell reasoned that if they were to place dead crows in a known study area, they might evoke the peculiar noise-silence-departure sequence from the resident crows. Testing that hypothesis, they found that they could not in fact evoke that behavior, but what did transpire was revealing. Within minutes of the carcasses’ appearance, resident birds uttered assembly vocalizations, which served to call in crows from the surrounding area. Soon, ten or more birds, all calling, circled over the dead ones. A few, residents of the study area, went to the ground for a closer look, perhaps checking to see if they knew the identity of the dead birds. A half hour later, it was all over. No silent period had ensued, and nothing that could be described as a funeral had taken place.
The parallels with the elephant research described in chapter 5 are notable. In Kenya, Cynthia Moss reported behavior that suggested a preference among elephants for the bones of their dead relatives. Specifically, she saw a seven-year-old male caressing, for a longer period than anyone else in his group, the bones of his mother’s jaw. Such attention, if directed preferentially toward the bones of animals that were loved when alive, could be one measure of elephant mourning. Then Moss and two colleagues made the same choice that the corvid scientists did—to follow up on an impression by launching an experiment. It turned out that elephants did not prefer bones of their own matriarch to bones of other groups’ matriarchs.
Just as I couldn’t dismiss the meaning of Moss’s anecdotal observation of an emotional elephant youngster because of the experimental data, I can’t now dismiss the idea that something of emotional significance is going on with corvids’ response to death. Marzluff and Angell don’t dismiss it either. In their more recent book Gifts of the Crow, they devote a chapter to “passion, wrath, and grief” among corvids. There they recount what happened when a golf ball hit a crow on a Seattle golf course. The precision strike was an accident, of course; concerned golfers who witnessed the crow go down were startled to see that another crow immediately came to its aid. This second bird pulled on the first crow’s wings, calling out all the while. Five more crows soon arrived. At that point, three crows together “began pecking and pulling on the apparently dead bird, trying to lift it up by the wings.” The golfers assumed the bird would not survive and moved on, only to learn two holes later from other players that the stricken crow had in fact revived and flown off.
This anecdote sure looks like the expression of compassion for an injured flockmate. In some cases, though, corvids respond to an injured companion by killing it. And once in a while a crow mob will gang up and kill a crow who doesn’t even seem to be injured. These are complex birds, and there’s no predictable outcome of their social encounters. Still, the helping behavior described sets the stage for thinking about love and grief in corvids. Marzluff and Angell emphasize that crows and ravens “routinely” gather around bodies of their own dead. That response may be adaptive, they think, to the extent that it aids the birds in assessing what killed their dead confederate (thus increasing their chances of avoiding that fate themselves). It may, in addition, help the birds size up their new place in the flocks’ shifting hierarchy.
“We also suspect,” Marzluff and Angell write, “that mates and relatives mourn their loss.” Given that we’re talking about complex creatures—the feathered apes—I suspect it too.
9
SEA OF EMOTION
DOLPHINS, WHALES, AND TURTLES
In the Amvrakikos Gulf off the coast of Greece, a mother, alone in the water with her offspring, tried over and over again to revive her child. She lifted the small body above the surface, then pushed it down under the water, then repeated the cycle.
The mother was a bottlenose dolphin, and the calf was a dead newborn; the observers were scientists aboard a research vessel from the Tethys Institute. They found themselves watching “desperate behavior” on the part of the mother, who, over the course of two days in 2007, vocalized and touched her calf with her rostrum and pectoral fins. The mother seemed unable to accept the fact of her calf’s death. Other dolphins from the mother’s group, numbering about 150, occasionally approached to observe the drama, but they neither interfered nor lingered. It was just the mother, and the dead baby, together in the water.
The researchers felt concern for the mother, and with good reason. Over about four hours in the course of two days, they never saw her feed. Given dolphins’ high metabolic rates, her total focus on the calf could have put her health in danger. The baby, meanwhile, had already begun to decay. Compared to the babies of monkeys and apes, marine mammal infants undergo rapid decomposition after death. The mother already had begun to remove pieces of skin and tissue from the corpse.
A passage from the scientists’ report about this dolphin mother described their own compassion:
The researchers on board did not feel like taking the calf away from the mother to perform scientific investigations (e.g., a necropsy of the calf). Their decision was intended as a form of respect towards a highly-evolved animal, the deep suffering of whom was obvious enough.
The researchers knew what they were seeing: maternal grief.
Just like monkey and ape mothers, dolphin mothers will sometimes carry the corpses of their dead infants. At times, though not in the Greek case, the mother’s social group attends acutely to this behavior. An early report of this type, from 1994, concerns bottlenose dolphins off the Texas coast. Some fishermen noticed that one dolphin, probably the mother, was laboring to keep a smaller deceased dolphin from washing ashore. Several adult dolphins moved in a clockwise direction around the pair; when the fishermen moved in closer, the animals began to slap the water with their tails. The maternal behavior continued for two hours and was observed again the next day (it was assumed that the same mother-infant pair was involved each time).
In a separate anecdote from the same report, volunteers from the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network observed an adult dolphin pushing a dead calf in the water. When the volunteers�
�� boat moved in, the adult swam away and resurfaced elsewhere, even as other dolphins swam nearby. By switching off the engine and drifting quietly closer, the rescuers managed to pluck the calf out of the water and bring it into the boat. At this, the mother became frantic, rushing underneath and at the boat.
I found myself wishing these volunteers had not intervened but instead had allowed the mother to experience her grief. The facts, though, temper this sentimental view: the mother could no longer help her baby, and she might have dangerously depleted her energy reserves had she kept on with such behavior. It’s even possible that this second Texas observation of maternal behavior involved the same dolphins as the first: it occurred only six days after, and twelve miles distant from, the earlier sighting. Had the marine-mammal volunteers spotted the same mother that the fisherman had? Could the mother possibly have endured in her efforts for that long a time? That the infant in the second sighting looked to be in worse physical shape than the first suggests that she may have.
In 2001 off the Canary Islands, rough-toothed dolphins were observed by scientists over the course of six days during whale-watching trips. One animal, presumably the mother, was seen pushing a dead newborn in ways that are by now familiar. This time, though, the mother had escorts—two adult dolphins who, Fabian Ritter reported in the journal Marine Mammal Science, “were swimming in a highly synchronous way, usually slightly in front of and constantly escorting the mother.” Other dolphins approached the mother and her escorts. The next day, similar behaviors were seen, and over the following four days, during four sightings, escorts were present three times. Meanwhile, the dead baby began to show signs of decay. By the fifth day, the mother left the calf alone for longer periods, but the dolphins still defended the corpse when a gull approached it. And, interestingly, the escorts began to participate in the calf-supporting behavior more directly: they swam, at times, with their backs underneath the body.
How Animals Grieve Page 11