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January/February 2000 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Seal wars Curious by nature

I WAS HIKING through the spruce woods one morning last winter, my footsteps hushed by snow, the sky a pearly canopy of soft grey clouds. Then the silence was stirred by the rustle of taffeta wings, as a glistening raven swept over the clearing. Its flight wavered slightly when it noticed me on the path, and it swivelled its head to cast an eye in my direction. "Quork," I called up to it, in broken Ravenese. "Kwarr," it croaked back, as if to acknowledge me. An ordinary moment had been transformed into memory.

Unlike most birds, ravens (Corvus corax) seem as interested in people as we are in them, and this in itself may help explain why we and our ancestors have always had a hunch that they may be exceptionally intelligent. Our sense of the bird’s special powers is reflected in a rich body of myths told throughout the raven’s world (a domain that spans much of the northern hemisphere). From Norway to Siberia and from the West Coast to Nunavut, the raven is variously celebrated as a soothsayer, trickster and creator of life — sometimes even an ancestor of humankind.

But it is one thing to intuit a kinship with these impressive birds and quite another to prove that we share, at least in some part, common attributes of awareness and intelligence. Yet that, in essence, is the task that University of Vermont biologist Bernd Heinrich has set himself in his new book, Mind of the Raven. The leading expert on the species in North America (if not the world), Heinrich has, by his own admission, "lived and breathed" ravens for the past 15 years. Yet, in the beginning, he was not overly impressed by the birds’ age-old reputation for braininess. "I didn’t start out at all interested in the question of intelligence," he says. "It was forced upon me by the birds themselves."

"I had begun by studying insects, which do what they do by instinct. Their behaviour is programmed into their genes. Like most scientists, I expected that the same would hold true when I switched to birds." Instead, Heinrich now strongly suspects that ravens are sentient beings with an ability to evaluate information, anticipate outcomes and, at times, resolve difficulties through creative thought. By this he means that the birds seem able to picture relevant details in their inner eye and to resolve certain problems through insight.

His most direct and compelling evidence of the raven’s mental prowess comes from a series of experiments he conducted in which captive individuals held in an aviary were presented with one of their favourite treats — a lump of leathery old salami. To make things interesting, Heinrich bound the meat to a string and dangled it under a perch, so that it was suspended in mid-air. The only way to obtain the reward would be to pull it up, something these ravens had never done. Heinrich was pretty sure they would be flummoxed. So imagine his astonishment when one raven first cautiously checked out the scene and then confidently proceeded to pull up loop after loop of string, anchoring each with his foot, until he had succeeded in hoisting up the prized food.

In subsequent trials, some ravens proved unable to solve the problem at all, an indication that playing string games is not instinctive. But others — perhaps the Einsteins of the raven race — obtained the meat within 30 seconds of touching the string. Even more amazing in Heinrich’s eyes was the fact that the successful birds never flew away with their salami-on-a-rope, as they would likely have done with an ordinary morsel. It was as if they understood, without even having to try, that the food would be ripped out of their bills if they attempted to fly.

"The significance of the remarkable behaviour of not flying off was that it was a new behaviour that was acquired without any learning trials," Heinrich notes. "They acted as though they had already done the trials. The simplest hypothesis is that they had — in their heads."

This leaves us to wonder what else might be going on inside those well-appointed craniums. When a raven drops a rock on a gull and scares it off its nest, is it deliberately plotting to get at the eggs? When another individual follows wolf tracks down a snowy trail, has it formed a plan to search for a kill? And when a raven meets a person, does it know what it has seen and consciously decide to respond to a greeting?

Short of becoming mind-readers — an accomplishment that, alas, is beyond even our own much-vaunted intelligence — we may never properly answer these questions. Yet, in the face of our limitations, we can take pleasure in the fact that when we think about ravens, they are probably thinking back.

Candace Savage is a Saskatoon-based writer and author of Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies and Jays.

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