Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (30 page)

I saw all five Druid pack members lounging in the snow like one big happy family on siesta. Two of the wolves were jet black, two were gray, and one was tan. That morning at about 9:30
A.M.
, the pack had killed an elk cow. This was wilderness at last.

The elk lay well exposed under an aspen tree. The wolves had eaten little meat so far, and the second act in this drama was beginning. Three or four ravens and at least as many magpies were already feeding on the carcass. The ravens made no attempt to chase the magpies. A golden eagle swooped down and landed on top of the carcass. The ravens and magpies flew up briefly, then walked round and round the carcass, moving closer, and gradually resumed their feeding. The golden eagle left in a half hour, and a bald eagle took its place. Ravens and magpies remained. Not once did the ravens chase another bird to steal food from it, as they had done in Oregon. Not once did the ravens hesitate to go in and feed, as they do in Maine. With wolves present, the ravens had no fear of the carcass. They could go in and get their own meat.

A few hours later, it was snowing hard. The wolves started to get up from their nap and stretch. One returned to the carcass and fed briefly, then they all walked off together in single file, fading like ghosts into the thickly falling snow as they rounded the crest of a low ridge. The next day, I walked up to examine this carcass, finding many fresh coyote and weasel tracks. Even if the wolves ate little of their kills, all of the carcasses would eventually be eaten. The carcass would feed weasels, grizzlies, coyotes, foxes, carrion beetles and corvids, eagles, maggots, and possibly a wolverine. The wolves provided for all, but I expected that here, precious little would be left for the maggots next spring.

I was told that the ravens sometimes followed the wolves, and that if they were not seen visibly following the pack, then they were “always” there “within minutes.” Observers and students of wolves take ravens for granted, commonly remarking that ravens and wolves go together. So much is taken for granted that further comment, or
data, have seemed superfluous. I tried to convince the wolf researchers otherwise, pointing out that nobody really knows the extent to which ravens may monitor or follow carnivores, or if they are simply opportunistic and sharp-eyed enough to see meat as it becomes available and then simply take it, as everyone assumes, but as my data disputed. My prod had an effect.

By the next winter, Doug Smith was in full support of appending a complimentary raven project onto the wolf project. Furthermore, Dan Stahler, who had already been following wolves and would continue to do so, agreed to take on the project by simultaneously gathering raven data. He would follow a protocol for getting systematic observations suitable for the first critical study on the raven-wolf association.

Dan reported to me after his first seven days of watching the fifteen wolves of the Rose Pack in late November 1997. He had then observed twenty-four activity bouts of wolves that involved traveling, resting, chasing, at kill, and near kill. In all but three of these, there were ravens with the wolves. In contrast, of nine activity bouts of coyotes, ravens were present at only two. By March, Dan had data on two dozen very recent kills, and ravens were feeding at all “in seconds or minutes.” Raven numbers at wolf kills averaged thirty-two, ranging typically from fifteen to thirty, and were over eighty at one kill. The ravens routinely fed within feet of wolves, coyotes, and eagles.

Dan’s description crackled with excitement: “Last Wednesday, I watched a large grizzly bear lay on top of a fresh wolf-killed elk for over four hours while nine wolves and about twelve to sixteen ravens tried to get in to feed. A couple times during the four hours the bear slept ‘spread eagle’ on the carcass, while the wolves bedded less than thirty meters away. The grizzly was fairly successful in keeping all away, but was extremely agitated by the ravens that kept grabbing food despite his lunging at them. This topped my list of best field observations. Doug [Smith] has started recording data from his flights {in light aircraft} whenever he observes wolves. The other day he saw three different packs involved in elk chases (two ending in kills). During two of the chases ravens were flying directly above the chase or
perched nearby. During one chase involving eight wolves there were eight ravens and two bald eagles soaring directly above. Amazing!”

Yes, I’ll second that. It is beginning to look as if ravens are dependent on wolves not only to kill for them and to open carcasses, but also to overcome their innate shyness of large food, whether in the form of a carcass or a pile (see Chapter 18). These facts hint at a relationship with an ancient evolutionary history.

Note: As this book was going to press, with the full cooperation and permission of park authorities, Dan had laid cut-open deer carcasses in established wolf territories where ravens, in over thirty previously observed cases, had always both shown up at wolf kills and fed with the wolves within minutes. In the twenty-five trials with the meat he provided that was unattended by wolves, no raven fed within the hour of observation period that his protocol called for. In the nine instances where one or two ravens discovered the unattended deer carcass, they circled the meat briefly and then left.

D
URWARD
A
LLEN, A PIONEER OF
wolf studies, remarked that the ravens of Isle Royale in Lake Superior accompany wolves in their travels, feed at their kills, and sometimes even eat their scats. L. David Mech from the University of Minnesota, who has studied wolves for decades, has seen ravens chase wolves, flying just above their heads, and reported in his book
The Wolf
that “once, a raven waddled to a resting wolf, pecked at its tail, and jumped aside as the wolf snapped at it. When the wolf retaliated by stalking the raven, the bird allowed it within a foot before arising. Then it landed a few feet beyond the wolf, and repeated the prank.”

Mech noted, as Allen did, that ravens appear to follow wolves, and he speculated that both must possess the psychological mechanisms necessary for forming social attachments, and that individuals of each species include members of the other in their social group, forming bonds with them.

Rolf O. Peterson, a former student of Mech’s now at Michigan Technical University, also studied wolves on Isle Royale. He agreed: “There is more than playfulness between wolves and ravens. Ravens make their living by scavenging wolf-killed moose (the fresher the better) and as we start the day, flying along wolf tracks, we often overtake a raven doing the same thing. When wolves pause, the birds also stop, roosting in trees or swooping to the ice where they can watch and harass the wolves at close range. Once disturbed, wolves resume travel, which is what the ravens intended. Also, few wolf scats left on open ice escape the selective recycling provided by foraging ravens.”

It is not surprising, as another former Mech student, Fred Harrington from the University of Nova Scotia, has shown, that ravens can be attracted to wolf howls. They also come to gunshots where there is much hunting of large animals. The wolves’ howls before they go on the hunt are a signal that the birds learn to heed. Conversely, wolves may respond to certain raven vocalizations or behavior that indicate prey.

Dan Stahler, in his observations of wolves and their association with ravens in Yellowstone National Park, saw ravens not only following wolves on their hunts, but also hanging around at the wolves’ dens. Whenever the wolves at a den got ready to hunt, they howled, and the ravens loitering there started to get lively and to vocalize as well. The pups start to come out of the den at about three weeks of age. They are smaller than ravens and could potentially be killed by them. Yet the ravens, who occasionally walk behind a young pup, only gently yank its tail.

There are innumerable anecdotes of dogs interacting with ravens as well. As one example I cite Graham W. Rowley (in
Cold Comfort: My Love Affair with the Arctic
, McGill Univ. Press, Montreal 1996). “One day I watched a raven flying low over the Inuit camp, heading into the wind. Chasing after it were about twenty dogs. The raven decided to rest and alighted on a large rock, ignoring the dogs dashing toward it. When the leading dog was only about three yards away, the raven turned its head toward them and gave a single baleful squawk. All the dogs stopped dead, turned around, and trotted back to camp
like sheep. The raven rested a few more minutes before taking off again into the wind.” Like the raven’s fear of carcasses the mutual attraction between wolf and/or dogs is a reflection of ancient selective pressures.

The raven-wolf association may be close to a symbiosis that benefits the wolves and ravens alike. Wildlife photographer and writer Jim Brandenburg, in his book
Brother Wolf
(see Notes), described ravens coming to an unopened bear carcass. They could get nothing but the eyeballs since ravens can’t open a carcass. The ravens then started yelling, and soon a wolf arrived and tore the carcass open. Brandenberg repeatedly saw wolves as well as coyotes come to a carcass that he provided shortly after it was discovered by ravens who were yelling.

Ravens may do even more than locate meat for the carnivores. Brandenberg says, “I can state unequivocally that, at a kill site, ravens are more suspicious and alert than wolves. In many instances, I have seen ravens become nervous at one of my small movements where the wolves seemed unaware. I believe that the birds serve the wolves as extra eyes and ears.” Wildlife filmmaker Jeff Turner suspects the same: “I can sneak up on a wolf,” he told me, “but
never
on a raven. They are
unbelievably
alert.”

In the High Arctic, ravens follow polar bears and feed at their kills, and in Yellowstone Park they also feed not only near coyotes and wolves but also sometimes with brown bear. Doug Peacock in
Grizzly Years
described watching a large grizzly sow and her cub at the edge of Wild Goose Valley in Yellowstone in late May. The grizzly dug and tugged at the ground among sagebrush, with ravens all around. At times, she reared and swatted at the cloud of ravens, flailing away at the air with her paws. The ravens probably also wanted what the bear was searching for, most likely pocket gophers or their seed caches.

Seldom do those whose activity provides food to ravens try, like the above-mentioned grizzly, to chase them off, especially wolves and humans. The Vikings, who usually got the upper hand in battle, eagerly welcomed ravens. To them the birds were an omen of victory, not doom. Why else would they fly their raven banner as they went
into battle? If the ravens followed people anticipating a glut of carrion, it was for the same reason they now follow wolves. As we shall see, the raven still follows people and is said to follow deer hunters in the Scottish Highlands, where its presence is similarly regarded as a portent of a successful hunt (Ratcliffe, 1997).

From a raven’s perspective, the closest thing to the aftermath of a Viking battle occurs every October in northern Maine at the annual moose hunt. I needed to see it, and drove to Greenville at the tip of Moosehead Lake to stay at Bob Lawrence’s hunting lodge near Rock-wood on the opening day of the hunt. The moose hunters streamed out at dawn, ranging up and down the dirt roads in their pickup trucks; nobody is keen to walk far into the woods to shoot a half-ton animal and then have to drag it out. I did not personally see a moose right after it was shot, but stopping to talk with hunters, I located six gut piles or their remains that were less than a day old. Ravens were feeding at all of them. One gut pile from a kill made the evening before had a stream of about fifty birds arriving when I checked it at dawn. One bird from this crowd pointedly came toward me, circled twice around my head at about ten yards, then flew back toward the others. This behavior made no sense to me. Did the bird mistake me for a hunter?

There are times when we perceive ravens to communicate with us. Craig Comstock, a raven-watcher from Starks, Maine, wrote of seeing a raven flying overhead. Craig called out, “Hey, how’s it going?” The raven immediately pulled a U-turn, did a half-roll, then went back on course. Craig waited until it had gone a bit farther and called again. Immediately, the raven pulled another U-turn, executed two back-flips and a half-roll before again returning to steady flapping. Craig commented, “I can’t prove the displays were for me. I understand the need for the scientific method, but…there are times when nature speaks just once, and it is a loss not to listen.”

Although ravens in New England are conspicuously shy, I have on several occasions seen one inexplicably come close to me, checking me out minutely. A Canadian Arctic biologist, Don Pattie, told me of tending small mammal traps on the Canadian High Arctic tundra
when a lone raven flew near and landed. Don held out his hand and talked to the raven, which walked up and “took a bite into my hand and then flew off.” Don was perplexed, but he was not totally surprised. Ravens may do surprising things. A raven researcher from Austria said, “Ravens are incalculable—and uncanny magic emanates from them.” Another biologist, Steven Wainwright, told me of taking a walk in the woods near Vancouver, British Columbia, where he heard three ravens overhead. One of them came down through the trees and “talked” to him, so he began to talk back, making “raven-noises. I sat down on a log and decided to talk in normal tones. I said, ‘Hi raven,’ that sort of thing. The raven came near, and when I got up to leave, that bird followed me while the others flew away…It was a mind-blowing experience.”

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.