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

pounds of meat scraps, that I had dropped in the woods. The idea was that we would release this bird next to the food; i.e., we would arrange for the bird to discover the food. Would she then find a roost and bring others?
    This would be our third release. After seventeen more, we might be wiser. At least, that was the idea. I couldn’t wait to get started. We decided to release our bird on the west side of Lake Webb, about a twelve-mile drive from camp. That site was about three miles from a white pine grove where a group of juvenile ravens was then roosting at night. We hoped that our bird would find that roost after she fed. Since ravens are shy, we expected the release to be tricky—the bird could easily flee in panic, paying no attention to the meat and never locating the roost.
    I needed to build a secure blind out of spruce and fir boughs from which to watch and release the bird. I drove out to the release site at 8:00 A.M. The snow was about a foot deep, caked in giant cushions all over the red spruces and balsam firs. Near a small opening about 150 yards in from the road, I found a thicket of firs in which I could construct a blind. Every blow of my ax to one of these trees released refreshing cascades of snow onto my head and neck.
    After two and a half hours, I had built the blind. I could only see a few pinpoints of light through the back of it, but I could peek out through the interlaced evergreen foliage in the front. It was a deluxe model, tall enough to stand up in. After lugging three garbage bags full of meat from my truck through the snow to the site, I felt relaxed and thoroughly warmed. The ice and snow down the neck was almost welcome.
    There was still time to get back to camp once more, so I drove back, jogged up the trail, and made some lunch. After that, I went to John’s place to pick up the bird. I saw her large bill and her eyes through the slats of the cage. She looked calm, much calmer than one might expect a captured wild raven to be. But they are never panicky if you handle them gently. They are often even as calm as a sleeping baby in your hands. I checked her on my radio receiver—on frequency 837 megahertz, her frequency. Yes— beep, beep, beep —she was coming through loud and clear. We would be able to track her movements even in the dark and discover where she went to sleep. We hoped she’d join the nearby roost.
    The sky was dark blue when I got back to the woods by the lake. There was no wind. I pulled the tarpaulin off the meat, making it visible for the first time. I made sure the bird had a good view of it from her cage. I unlatched the door, but kept it shut, and gave her fifteen minutes to see the bait from her cage.
    I retreated into my blind, settled onto the furry deer hide I’d brought, along with binoculars, radio receiver, and note pad, and peered through the latticework of evergreen boughs.
    Within a few minutes, the bird began to hammer the door with her bill. I had attached a fifty-foot-long string to open the cage door, but in three minutes she opened the door herself, without any help from me. Totally silent and with hardly a glance right or left, she walked to the bait and began eating fat. She hacked off gob after gob and swallowed each one, then she walked all over the bait, gently picking here and there as if inspecting details. She picked up a piece of fat and walked directly toward me, stopping at the very edge of my blind to shove the morsel into the snow. Then she covered it with more snow in several back-and-forth bill-swipes. After this first cache, she made another, and another…a total of fifteen, all at different locations and within raven walking distance. She seemed to disdain flight and vocalizations, two things I considered major raven avocations. When there is a crowd of birds at a carcass, their behavior is very different; they never walk to make caches. They always fly long distances, and make a lot of noise near the carcass.
    Suddenly, her