In the Company of Crows and Ravens

They lack the colour glories of parrots and lorikeets. They're not like the little tweetie birds of our childhood books. Probably the best known of them is Poe's bleak image - perched atop a skull croaking its dismal litany. Long before Poe, however, the corvids had gained a shady reputation in Western European legends and myths. Crows and ravens were messengers of dark fortunes sent by agents of evil intent. As is so often the case with relying on literature to depict Nature, the legends misled us. The reality is far more interesting and explains more than fiction ever has. Marzluff and Angell, are dedicated scholars in the history and legends of the corvids. This book reflects well that background, and their combined skills present what they've gleaned with style and wit. Perhaps no other species has shown how Darwinian adaptability can work as have crows, the authors suggest. Once wild and scattered, the crow has become habitated to human settlement. They were certainly scavengers at human feeding sites, whether people were hunters or scavengers themselves. Agriculture clearly brought them from the forests to the fields we planted. Grain crops - "the staff of life" - enticed them to our neighbourhoods quickly. The rise of cities only intensified the contact and offered the crow fresh opportunity. The "fast-food" restaurant, with its Dumpsters and scattered, food bearing trash, brings them hovering over what they clearly find a delicacy. They may even become selective, choosing the more brightly-coloured fries container over an equally laden drab one. It's even possible that the newly inhabited urban existence may be enhancing their numbers. The hunting activities in farmland is lacking in the city, but there are many nesting sites. We may complain about their noisy presence, but we brought them into our neighbourhood. Nobody has ever questioned the intelligence of the Corvus genus. Crows, ravens, rooks and their relations are considered grand tricksters at best, and opportunist thieves at least. Their intelligence is stated by the authors as being the equivalent of "flying monkeys". Marzluff and Angell relate how crows in Japan took up residence near a driving school. They learned to drop nuts under the tires of stopped autos, returning to retrieve the meat after the wheel passed over and crushed the nut. The talent spread out over time and crows many kilometres away now practice the feat. Antics of this sort have been observed over the centuries, with our culture adopting Corvid elements into stories and descriptions. What are the wrinkles alongside the eyes of the elderly, but "crow's feet". We'll pass over the origins of "eating crow". Corvid intellect goes beyond tricks and chance. The authors have witnessed both a murder of a crow by its fellows. They've also observed "funerals" in which a mob of crows silently surrounds a departed member [not the "murdered" one] for a long period, only to depart without a

Fascinating book. The sheer amount of literary and artistic references the authors bring in serve to show the importance of crows to our culture. The epigraph is a Robert Frost poem, "Dust of Snow." Lots of facts and trivia. For example: corvids' stout, all-purpose bills are often compared to Swiss Army knives because they can cut, tear, crush, gape, probe, rip, and open just about anything. Longevity: Common ravens have lived 13 years in the wild, and forty to eighty (!) years in captivity. Raven roosts vary in size from fifty to two thousand birds each night. American crows roost in groups of up to two million. Illustrations of corvid skulls, next to other birds, to show how much larger their brain-case is than most birds. Lots of lovely drawings - although many of the ones meant to show the differences between the various species look exactly the same to me. Note: "crows" includes crows, ravens, jackdaws, and rooks (all the same genus, 46 species); "corvids" includes all those plus magpies, jays, and nutcrackers (all the same family). The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher once quipped, "If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows." Some crows have started playing a game involving a tennis net and old tennis balls left on the court, after observing humans playing tennis. This observation is part of a greater point that the authors are making, which is that crows have culture, perhaps even more so than most of the great apes, up at the level of dolphins and whales - dialects and regional accents of crow calls, lots of learned behavior transmitted to the young by teachers, and other signs that distinguish culture from nature. The authors discuss the influence of crows on human culture: the importance of crows in mythologies from around the world, the association of crows with death (although, disappointingly, they completely neglect to mention the beautiful song "The Three Ravens" and its vulgar cousin, "The Twa Corbies"), how humans' recognition of the differences between crows' intelligence and domesticated animals' intelligence has helped us define the concept of "domesticated" and so on. Did you know that the cave paintings of Lascaux include birds that are clearly crows or ravens?

Crows and ravens have always lived with me and I with them. As an only child who grew up among adult human relatives, I may have had more "socialization" training from crows than from my own human family. About the only thing the crows didn't teach me was how to knit. (I learned that from my father who swore me to secrecy!) What I know now is that if the crows saw any need for sweaters, they'd have taught me that too. This book explores intertwined ecologies, mutual destinies, cultural coevolution - it moves on to future interactions, making observations to learn more (Appendix One), and children's books (Appendix Two). With lots of notes and references, just about anything you might want to know about crows and ravens can be found here directly or you'll be directed to the source you need.

"Gregarious, family grouped, long-lived, diurnal, vocally and visually astute, and reliant on memory and individual recognition." Yes, that might be a biological description of us humans, but it's a description from _In the Company of Crows and Ravens_ (Yale University Press) by John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell. We share those traits with the birds that are the subject of this fine book, mostly because we, like they, have big brains and use them. Dolphins and humans have bigger brain-to-body ratios, but the crow and raven ratio is something like that of most primates: "Mentally, crows and ravens are more like flying monkeys than they are like other birds." As a result, we have had a richer history of cooperating with these corvids (the family also includes rooks, jackdaws, and magpies) and competing against them. As a measure of our attention to these birds, for instance, this wide-ranging book cites their influence on our language; cats and dogs have more words, but no wild animal has more than crows and ravens. The examples include scarecrow, crow's feet, crowbar, and ravenous. We also crow about good news, but we also from time to time have to eat crow. We say "as the crow flies" when we want to indicate a linear distance between geographical points, but that's out of ignorance: crows take breaks and (as befits birds with brains) get distracted to check out other routes along the way. Crows and ravens have been our partners throughout history, and this broad and brightly-written book will increase anyone's appreciation for them and for the partnership. Crows and ravens are scavengers on what humans throw out; so are pigeons and seagulls, for that matter, but those aren't as intelligent or observant as corvids. They could have managed in the wild without humans, but they have been able to thrive in our towns and cities. People who admire crows and ravens generally do so because they have a reputation for being clever, or even sagacious. There are many examples given here of intelligent behavior. Crows have a good communication system, and the authors encourage you to try playing mind games with them by broadcasting commercially-available recordings of crow calls. Crows who hear a distress call, for instance, do not immediately fly away from the call; instead, they fly to it to investigate what is going on, and perhaps learn about the danger. After that, they may stay away for weeks. As befits animals with intelligence, crows play; they may play catch with paper or sticks for no reason except that it seems to be an enjoyable way to spend time. They deliberately climb snowy hills to sled down again on their bellies, and they do this repeatedly. They do rolls, dives, and loops when flying. Crows even use us to do their bidding. In Sendai, northern Japan, carrion crows don't just use gravity to crack the walnuts of which they are fond. They have learned to fly down in front of cars waiting for a stoplight to change, place the

In the Company of Crows and Ravens recounts in great deal how crows and human beings have lived intimately together, influencing the cultural and biological evolution of one another. Crows have developed ingenious ways to take advantage of human presence, from opening garbage bags to using automobiles to crack nuts. They have developed complex societies that resemble those of human beings, based on the nuclear family yet incorporating many other kinds of associations. They probably excel all animals but human beings in the manufacture of tools and the use of language. They share with dogs a remarkable ability to "read" human gestures and expressions. And yet, perhaps because it so pervades our daily lives, we take this partnership with crows, together with the responsibilities that accompany it, for granted. As this book documents, it is an important part of what has made us "human."