Ravens and the Inaccessible

Orion, Autumn 1995

 

 

It is hard to get to know a wild creature, especially so for a scientist, who must be unbiased and cannot presume that a wild creature is somehow like a human, despite knowing a human is an animal. For as Henry Beston once said about animals, “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

For twelve years I have been trying to illuminate the “nations” of the so-called common raven, Corvus corax. I’d like to see the world as through their eyes, as I must before I can understand them. Thus, I have to go into their country. Even here they are shy, because for many generations they have been driven to shun humans. Accused of killing lambs, they were poisoned at baits. They were shot for “sport,” as “varmints.” In New England ravens were nearly driven to extinction. Those few that remained nested in remote mountain crags far from human intrusion.

Now, happily, they are edging ever closer to human contact because, since the collapse of sheep farming, they are no longer persecuted as presumed vicious lamb killers. The most recent nest I found was in a pine tree, in back of the parking lot at a car dealership in Farmington, Maine.

I saw my first nest about thirty years ago. It was (and still is, every year) in a tall white pine near a small, isolated mountain lake, the home of a pair of loons. I had been walking on the crusty snow in March, along the leatherleaf-bordered frozen lake, when I saw two large black birds with wedge-shaped tails. Their resonant rasping calls confirmed that I was near a nest, and I soon saw it in the crown of one of the larger pines. The snow beneath the tree was littered with freshly snapped-off aspen twigs that had fallen from the nest platform. Both birds circled at some distance from me, but as they banked I saw the sun flashing off their burnished wings, which glinted like polished metal. Their calls varied from deep, long, angry-sounding, rasping caws, to series of short, high, flute-like calls, to xylophone-like staccato sounds. I had no idea what any of them meant, and for the most part, I still don’t.

The tantalizing wonders of the birds’ home life were so remote, so inaccessible, that they exercised my imagination. My romance with the otherness of corvids had been instigated by a pet crow I had as a child. It was now rekindled, and would become a consuming passion. Years later at a moose carcass surrounded by a crowd of exuberant ravens, I began to wonder if, how, and why ravens share huge food bonanzas. To try to answer those questions I’ve raised young ravens from babies and lived with them. With friends I’ve dragged stillborn calves, expired cows, and road-killed deer and moose deep into the snowy Maine woods. With John Marz-­luff and other friends and colleagues, we’ve captured, marked, and released 463 ravens to plot their movements, interactions, and identities. Some answers are now available and secured in technical journals.

But to really know the wild raven, I wanted to see its home life up close—to observe it raising its young. I would not get my first look into a raven’s nest until after many years of studying them from a distance. By chance I found a nest on a cliff with a view from the top of an adjoining cliff. Woodland grew to the edge of the cliff, and at this edge I built a hiding place by laying spruce and fir branches over a hole dug into the deep snow. It was late February. Through a peephole in my blind I had an unobstructed view down into the nest, about thirty feet away. In order not to disturb the ravens I did not again venture near my pygmy hut until the young had hatched, in late April. As before, the alarm sounded when I came, and when the birds left I crept into my blind. I was prepared to wait.

Barry Lopez has written, “If you want to know more about the raven, bury yourself in the desert so that you have a commanding view of the high basalt cliffs where he lives. Let only your eyes protrude. Do not blink . . .” I knew from previous experience that this statement was only partially true—one cannot allow even one eye to be within range of their sharp eyesight. The raven is cautious. I flattened myself against the far wall of my cave, and hardly blinked. Hours may have passed. But it was a warm spring day and the first wave of wood warblers had returned—the yellow-rumped, the black and white, the northern waterthrush, and the ovenbird. The very air seemed suffused with birdsong. The yodeling of the red-winged blackbirds was almost drowned out by a chorus of wood frogs, which in turn was periodically interrupted by a bittern’s resounding booms—ka-thunk, ka-thunk—and a Wilson snipe’s whinnying challenge. A winter wren searched for gnats in my thicket of twigs, and then erupted in a vibrant refrain, while an eastern phoebe called from a dry branch near the cliff below. But the ravens, both adults and young, remained silent. I peeked down at the four pink youngsters growing a black stubble of pinfeathers. Their limp bodies lay heaped into a pile. Occasionally they squirmed weakly in their deep nest cup of fluffy deer hair. They slept.

I was shocked out of my reverie by the sharp ripping sounds of powerful wing beats reverberating from the cliff walls, as if off a drumhead. A raven landed on the thick, dry twigs of the nest’s edge. Instantly four heads shot out of the nest mold, and their bright-red open mouths waved back and forth like tulips in a breeze, to the accompaniment of loud begging calls. In less than a second the big bird inserted its bill into one of the gaping maws and promptly regurgitated meat from its crop. The youngster swallowed greedily, now making sounds faintly like a churning motor. Then it wilted down into the nest as the parent fed the next one.

One youngster backed up to, but not quite over, the nest edge to try to relieve itself over the nest rim. It succeeded in the first, but not in the second. The adult gently picked off the white fecal sac and swallowed it. It then inspected the nest closely, picking out other recyclables. Then the raven launched itself down to an aspen tree just below. Its mate took its place at the nest, and also left quickly. The domestic chores done for the moment, the couple then briefly sat side by side basking in the sun, making soft cooing sounds. She (for I could now compare them) nuzzled up to him and bent her head down, and he responded to her solicitation by preening her feathers on the back of her neck, as requested.

This experience reverberates in my mind, each detail of behavior like a dab of color in a great painting of the birds’ world. Each dab of color is nothing when in isolation, but the whole makes each a beautiful picture. I felt the privilege that comes with seeing what many others have not seen. And I pondered what I might have felt had I seen “it” instead on the television screen by pressing a button and watching it along with millions of other viewers, and whether or not I’d have been moved to experience this day as I had. I wondered how much we had gained by instant gratification, and how much we had lost.

There is value in the inaccessible. Maybe inaccessibility is a value. And the raven is a part of the wildness and unknown regions that Thoreau wrote about. He said that we sometimes need to wade “in marshes where the bitterns and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe [sic], to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest . . .” The most uncharted marshes, the most inaccessible wilderness, and hence to me the most seductive aspect of the raven, is not only the place where it dwells but also its mind, which is an adaptation to its unique life. What whispering thoughts are at the edge of the raven’s mind? To seek answers is like looking for windows to another planet, or to see ours from another perspective.

I may have learned much about the raven after these twelve years. For instance, I have learned that it shares out of self-interest, and I now know some of the mechanics of how and why the crowds assemble from afar at a rare food bonanza. I have an inkling as to what a few of its calls mean. However, I have also learned that its mind, like the immortal wilderness, is not fully accessible to our experience. We can, with sufficient effort, be rewarded by elucidating puzzles or by peering into its nest to see its home life. But secrets are never divulged easily, nor should they be. Space exploration ain’t easy, either, but knowing the difficulties, you appreciate it all the more. Perhaps it is better to make trails to the edge of the wilderness rather than through it.

If you venture to the edges of things, you reach out to try to see mysterious vistas, for it is the far reaches beyond the horizon that attract. That is why ravens, like other creatures, will be forever fascinating. They invigorate and appeal to the wonder that is the basis of our humanity.

 

A common raven, Corvus corax, in neutral posture when at rest.