oftpc - Mind of the Raven

[AgilisMerlin]

love this book, been taking little chunks for well over a year.

http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173183652l/254704.jpg

"Near 3:00 p.m., we saw many ravens returning to the DEW tower from the distant ice pack. When the seal and walrus hunting is good, the bears eat on the fat, leaving the rest of the carcass. The ravens and perhaps Arctic foxes finish the rest. An old hunter, Noah Piugaattug, whom I met in the village, explained to me that scavenging ravens are noisy, and polar bears will become used to their calls. Polar bears sometimes feed on dead marine animals that ravens find first, and the bears are attracted by the raven's calls. When hearing raven's cries at food, bears without a kill to feed from often become distracted or attracted. Inuit hunters therefore imitate ravens calls as a technique to get closer to a bear."



http://www.fixedgearbiking.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/polar-bear-bike.jpg

[Tom]

Heinrich is a favorite of mine. "Ravens in Winter", "One Man's Owl", "Winter World", "Why We Run" are all on my shelf and worth reading more than once.

[Onno]

I agree. Heinrich is an amazing researcher, thinker, and writer. "Mind of the Raven" is the first book of his I read. Essential reading for anyone interested in the natural world.

[AgilisMerlin]

page 251 same page as snippet above: this book speaks volumes

"No raven had wing-tipped me so far to indicate potential prey, as Akaka Sataa at Iqaluit had talked about. Akaka had also told me that an incantation was required by the hunter to elicit wing-tipping, and the magic words to address the raven were not given away to just anyone. In the old days, the incantation was bought from the shaman, because the magic words were very valuable. Abe Okpik, an elderly man of Iqaluit who was no longer a hunter, and whose uncle was named none other than Tulugaq (raven) , later had told me that when out on the land hunting caribou, or out on the ice hunting polar bear, a hunter seeing a raven fly over used to look up to it and call its name loudly three times: "Tulugaq, Tulugaq, Tulugaq." Having the bird's attention, he would then yell to it, telling it to tumble out of the sky in the direction of the prey. If the raven gave its musical gong-like call three times in succession, then the hunters went in that direction and killed it. "They believed in the raven strongly, and followed it," said Okpik. "And after they killed the caribou of the polar bear, they always left the raven the choicest tidbits of meat as a reward." It seemed absurd to me that a hunter could signal to a bird, and the bird would in turn provide information asked of it. Yet I wanted to keep an open mind to the possibility of communication."

[AgilisMerlin]

page 258 snippet: these coming from dog tagged(eared) pages

Next, I threw in new variables. I let in the other half of this raven group, Blue, Green, and Yellow, and I gave them a calf head. Blue was the most dominant bird of the six, and he fed by standing on top of the food, as is the dining etiquette among ravens. Blue focused on trying to extricate the calf's eye, while all the others except for Orange fed amply on the calf meat. Being the next in line in the dominance hierarchy just below Blue, Orange was always the main object of Blue's aggression at food. Orange held back and waited. During the moment that Blue was pulling the eye free, when I (and probably Orange) knew he'd fly off to cache it, Orange flew off his perch and landed on the calf head and started tearing at the meat. As Blue spent more than two minutes walking and looking for a place to cache the eye, Orange had two minutes of feeding time. Having finally cached the eye, Blue returned to resume feeding at the calf head, and Orange left it. Several minutes later, I happened to see White, the most subordinate bird of the group, fly by me into the other aviary, carrying the calf eye in her bill. She had found Blue's cache.

This anecdote reinforced my impression that the ability of these birds to anticipate the action of others, coupled with their good memory, are traits that can compensate in competition with larger and more dominant associates. My observations were possible only because I was so closely in their midst. My rearing them from nestlings, and daily association with them for ten months, had won me their trust, which made the expression of their fine-grained unfiltered and hence complex behavior possible in my presence. The aviary also compensated for my inability to fly. I could follow them here, while at the same time provide an experimentally crowded situation that elicited flexible and innovative behavior that otherwise might occur only rarely in the field where the birds can more easily avoid each other if they choose.