Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds Read Online Free PDF Page A

status flip-flop, he had seventeen top-bird positions on carcasses versus fifteen for Fuzz (and four for Lefty and one for Houdi). After he became dominant again, he held the top-bird position thirty-four times versus three for Fuzz, none for Lefty, and one for Houdi.
    Throughout the winter, Goliath clearly remained the dominant bird, regularly showing erect “ear” feathers and flaring his feather “pants,” the trapping of high raven status. Fuzz displayed rarely, and the females never. Most of the fights and chases were between the two females, who had a long dominance battle. In most of these interactions (twenty-one versus three), Lefty prevailed over Houdi.
    Goliath’s dominance display became even more pronounced by late February. Whenever I brought in a piece of food that he was anxious to have, he immediately flashed his ears, flared his “baggy pants,” then slowly swaggered up to the food and took it. The others always hung back with smoothed-down head feathers, then bowed down and fluffed their head feathers whenever they came near him. His dominance was no longer tentative. It was palpable, demonstrable, unquestioned, and unchallenged. Fuzz, in contrast, responded to my bringing food by begging like a baby bird.
    At two years of age, Fuzz was still doing the baby bird wing-flutter and uttering high-toned begs whenever I came near him, although the other three birds had not done either since November in their first year. Doting father that I was, I had begun to see them as characters, and I would soon be observing what had never been possible in the field. One of them would end up taking a wild bird as a mate, and nest in the wild by my cabin.

A group of ravens feeding near one of my observation blinds. This photo was taken with a 400 mm lens from a window of my house in Hinesburg, Vermont .

     

A Field Experiment
     
    F OR YEARS , I WONDERED IF RAVENS in the wild who had discovered food were instrumental in bringing in, or “recruiting,” others to the feast.
    In field experiments, you may set up contrived but plausible situations to test responses. This has problems, the main one being that your subjects usually choose not to show up to participate in your plans. Or if they do show up, they are moved by agendas over which you have no control. My usual field approach in the early 1980s was to drag a calf carcass into the woods and then watch from a hiding place, hoping to see something interesting. Eventually, after four years and thousands of hours watching, I determined that various adult ravens lived in pairs near my study, while juveniles seemed vagrant, wandering widely, coming and going. The adults usually defended carcasses I put out, chasingthe vagrant juveniles off. At least in late winter, vagrants slept together in large groups and they sometimes recruited their roostmates to bait, arriving in noisy crowds from their sleeping place long before daylight. This crowd then got to feed by overcoming the adult defenders.
    In 1988, John Marzluff, who recently had earned a doctoral degree from the University of Arizona at Flagstaff, joined me to help tackle the next problem: how ravens recruited others from the communal roost. Did they perform a dance, as bees do in a hive? Did the birds have specific “follow me” signals? Did the most knowledgeable birds leave the roost early and purposefully provide a cue that the roost-birds follow the first bird out? Did the dominant or the more subordinate juveniles recruit? Who benefited, and why? What were the costs of recruiting?
    In the field experiments that John and I were about to do in mid-December 1990, we wanted to test for the effect of a vagrant’s status on recruitment, attempting to keep everything else constant. Our idea was to release a bird of known status directly at a calf carcass in the woods and then see which birds, having discovered our offering, would subsequently bring other birds back later.
    We had done other versions of this