Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (14 page)

For a practice-capture, I had set a trap just outside the aviary, where a small crowd of ravens had been attracted by my four tame birds at their food. First I covered the trap with a thin sheet of cellophane that fit just inside the opened jaws. I set it on dry wood duff on top of the snow, sprinkled more wood duff all over the trap, then sifted snow over the whole lot to camouflage it all. I placed a small
piece of horse meat in the snow—small enough, I thought, that the birds wouldn’t get suspicious.

The ravens came to the aviary first thing in the morning, as expected. From a corner of the cabin window, I watched them by the baited trap. Nothing seemed to be happening. After an hour, I knew something was wrong, and I went out to see what it might be. There were many raven tracks by the meat, all right, but none were on the trap. The birds must have noticed that the sifted snow over the trap was different than the rest of the snow, but that was not all that was wrong with this trap set.

Temperatures had been near zero degrees Fahrenheit in the night, and I had not expected any melting and refreezing. Recalling Murphy’s Law—if anything can go wrong, it will—I gently poked the top of the snow I had sprinkled over the trap. It was congealed into a crust, so that even if a raven had walked across the trap, it would not have sprung.

The next step was to make false trap sets near the baits to get the residents used to sifted snow and other unfamiliar telltale marks that might make them suspicious. Delia and I set off down the hill under a dark gray morning sky. I didn’t like the looks of that sky. If it snowed for only a half hour, we’d have to pull up all our traps. We set them nevertheless. Then it snowed for a half hour, then twenty-four more hours. The blizzard raged for days.

Meanwhile, for three days in a row, one of the traps alongside the aviary had sprung without catching anything. One morning, while I was a half mile away by Alder Stream, I heard a commotion from near the aviary up on the hill. Hearing alarm calls, I rushed back. One of the traps had indeed been sprung. The raven had pulled out. Conclusion? Number I traps were too small. I’d have to get all new traps.

As expected, no ravens came by for the next few days, and I feared they would not allow us any more mistakes. While I was practicing with the new traps I had procured, we also felt ever more the pinch of the weather. We had a series of warm, clear days, and that meant the snow was no longer powdery and easy to sprinkle for camouflaging. The soggy snow could be put on only in thick wads, which melted in the sun in the daytime, then froze rock solid at night.

By March 10, we still had not retained a single raven in a trap, not even just for practice near the aviary at the cabin. But the time had come, if not gone, to try to go for the real thing, one of the territorial pairs. In the cool rain, the crust on the deep, soggy snow no longer supported our weight, and we plunged down with each step, even while wearing snowshoes. Nevertheless, Delia and I built two blinds of spruce and fir branches about one hundred yards from each of two bait sites by two nest sites. Here, we’d watch our captures the next day.

We started at 5:00
A.M.
, ready in the dark for the big event. We had learned a lot in the previous two weeks about what not to do. We figured that we’d finally get it right. By dawn, we were snowshoeing to the first blind, where Delia would take her stand to watch a set of four traps ringed around a piece of meat that had had fresh raven tracks around it the previous afternoon. We put each trap in a scrape in the frost-hardened snow, using dry potting soil as a foundation. Then we sprinkled more dry soil onto the trap itself and put a piece of wax paper over the pan to cover the surface between the open padded jaws. We camouflaged the traps with a dusting of snow dug out from under the crust, and we put snow dusting even where there were no traps. We also hid the chains under snow. We did everything just right.

I wished her good luck and trotted back down the trail to go to my stand at the Weld nest. There, I also found frost-hardened raven tracks from the day before near the piece of meat. A very good sign! The birds had been back, even though we had dug up the meat, disturbed the snow all around, and moved the meat to a small hillock where it was now visible from the blind. The bad sign was that one of the birds flew over making alarm cries just before I finished setting the traps. Knowing the bird would now be suspicious, I aimed to distract it from the traps around the bait by putting two big bright orange cheese puffs onto the snow. When the raven came back, it would see these strange things. Knowing I had come to do something, this raven would associate the orange puffs with me, then avoid them. It then might think I hadn’t come to the meat, and would then not be alarmed by the meat, since that had not been changed. Although I then had suspicions how raven might size up a potential meal, I still did not know that their
knowledge and expectation of whether friends or enemies had been associated with that food can have a tremendous bearing on whether or not they eat it.

I was in my blind only forty-five minutes when I heard heavy wing-beats. The raven had come back! It made only three or four alarm calls, then quieted down. Five minutes later, it flew down from near the nest in the pines (I could not see the nest itself) to the top of the snow near the bait. It did not go to the bait, though. The raven paced back and forth and all around for some ten yards to either side of the bait. Something, it knew, wasn’t quite right here—and it flew off.

A half hour later, near 8:00
A.M.
, its mate came to the nest, making soft, high-pitched calls. Fifteen minutes later, one of the pair flew down to the snow, and walked up to the bait with little hesitation. My heart began to pound. Really hard. Weeks of frustration, hundreds of miles of driving, days spent on snowshoes walking laboriously through deep, heavy snow, endless planning, endless details—all were coming to fruition. Was
this
the moment? I had watched and baited them for weeks to learn their habits, to get them habituated to minor disturbances, so that they would not notice a hidden trap buried in the snow. And here was a raven, miraculously walking directly to a piece of meat with four traps set all around it.

The bird stopped, looked cautiously all around, and advanced again. Then I saw it pecking—it was feeding at the meat! It fed, and fed some more, and more. Amazing! I had set the four traps, I thought, on hair triggers. It was at least fifty to sixty yards from my blind to the bait, and I had only a very narrow field of vision through all the many trees of the forest through the spruce boughs of my blind. Slowly, ever so slowly, deep within my spruce blind I raised my binoculars—
rrack rrack rrack
—instantly, the bird erupted in alarm calls and flew off. It had likely seen only a glint of light off the binocular lenses. It could not have seen me.

About fifteen minutes later, a raven was back, again feeding at the same spot. After about five minutes, the raven flew up to the nest, possibly to feed its mate. It again made the high-pitched, soft mewing
calls. Ten minutes later, one bird left the nest, making soft
gro
calls as it flew off. They always announce both their comings and goings with at least some kind of call. The female, who stayed at the nest, did her knocking call once.

By 9:15, a raven was again back at the bait. It fed leisurely for several minutes, then flew off. I was dumbfounded, and I was shivering from the cold and the excitement. It was the third time the bird had come this morning. The raven
had
to get caught on the third time, I thought. Wrong.

Some minutes after the raven left, presumably satiated, I heard very excited, sharp, high, quick caws. Two crows came flying over. The crows saw meat, turned around, flew back, and immediately landed, making the same excited caws. Would the ravens now chase them off? I waited—in less than two minutes one of the crows already started to feed. It was caught within seconds. The just-trapped crow was by no means silent, but its mate, hopping frantically in the branches twenty to forty feet away, was the more hysterical-sounding individual. I waited a minute or two to see if there might be a response from the ravens. I could see or hear none, so I came out of my blind and released the crow unharmed.

As I left, snowshoeing back out of the woods, the two crows circled over me and continued to caw excitedly. I did not expect the ravens to be back for a while. For once, I was correct. No more tracks were seen near the bait here again, even though the pair nested in the pine tree just above it. I never did figure out how the raven avoided the trap. I never caught either of the pair, only two more crows.

The next day, March 13, I trapped at a new spot where ravens had never seen me at a bait. It was a quarter mile from a nest and it was also a 1.5-mile snowshoe hike from the road, where I had seldom ventured. The trap was set at a carcass. This time, in only one hour I had caught a bird! It was silent, but as with the crows, its mate called loudly and angrily near me as I took the unharmed bird out of the trap.

That same day this bird—the only resident we would catch—flew off with a radio attached to his tail feathers, beaming pulses at a
radio frequency of 14,8130 hertz, or “8130” for short, our name for this bird from now on. Our study could now begin, although on a much more modest basis than we had planned. Most of the work had already been done.

Number 8130 seemed calm throughout the whole handling procedure. Since his feathers had become soaked, he was clumsy in flight when we released him up near the cabin at dusk. He would have to dry off before flying back to the nest. At first, he stayed until after dark in the Alder Stream valley just below the cabin. Wondering if he would travel at night, I got up near midnight and made another radio check. He was gone, but there was a very faint signal from the nest direction. So he
had
flown in the night. After this, Ted, Delia, and Eileen tracked him every day from dawn till dark. In the first two weeks of tracking, he spent most of his time alternating between the nest site and a cow carcass that a coyote trapper had dropped in the woods.

I returned to the nest on March 25 to determine if the female was, as I presumed, incubating. It seemed time for her to incubate, because I had seen the two birds approach the nest, with one carrying nest lining, on March 12, the day before I captured him. There were no birds near the nest this time, and none flew off the nest when I banged on the tree to try to flush off the incubating female. Was the female an exceptionally tight sitter? Was the nest abandoned due to my previous presence here, or due to stress associated with my tagging one of the birds? The nest was about ninety feet up in a giant, thick white pine tree that was nearly limbless up to sixty feet. I did not dare risk my neck climbing this very difficult tree to check the nest contents. To find out if the nest was still active, I would have to watch it.

I made myself comfortable about fifty yards from the nest, hiding under a dense young fir tree next to another thick pine. My attention was fully engaged as I tried to detect a sound or a flash of black wings.

Then a miracle happened. The radio signal got louder. 8130 was approaching. I heard the beautiful, clear, bell-like xylophone knocking of a female raven. Within seconds, I heard it again, closer. Then I
heard it again and again. There was no doubt, both he and the female were approaching the nest from the northwest. Looking through the fir branches in the direction of the calls and radio signal, I saw black specks approaching. Not one, or two, but
three!

I could easily conjure up a rationale (however true or false it may be) to account for a third bird in a territory. Perhaps it was a male sneaking in to mate with the female. Perhaps it was a neighbor trying to damage or destroy the nest to enlarge its own territory. But whatever reason I could come up with, it invariably had to do with the third bird being up to no good, and the pair doing their best to evict him or her.

One glance at these birds, however, told me that I was seeing something entirely different. The three birds flew calmly, wing-tip to wing-tip. As they came closer, I heard the soft
gro
calls that signified trust and friendship. These three birds were friends, and the idea that a territorial pair of ravens had friends outside the pair-bond that they tolerated, if not invited near the nest, seemed extraordinary.

I watched spellbound as the three, now chatting softly among themselves, all flew into the nest tree. Two of the three birds landed directly by the nest, while the third flew near it, then veered off and calmly flew back in the same direction from which they had all come. The pair stayed at the nest for only a minute, chatting constantly in low tones. I heard the begging call that females make when wanting to be fed near the nest. When the two left the nest, they first perched in a nearby pine for another minute, and then flew off in the same direction the third bird had just flown.

I wanted to build a blind right then and there and keep the nest under long-term observation, but other approaches were needed. My staying there would merely increase the chances of disturbing the birds and possibly disrupting their breeding effort. I would have to forgo further surveillance until much later, when disturbance would less likely disrupt the breeding.

We left the nest alone, but we frequently found our bird at a trapper’s cow carcass about two miles from the nest. When we covered this carcass up with brush to see where else 8130 might forage, he usually
disappeared from radio contact. Judging that incubation must surely be in progress, I visited the nest again on March 29. When I came close, 8130 was in the pines near his nest, and he made alarm calls and left. As before, no bird flew off the nest when I hit the nest tree with a heavy stick. Odd, I thought. Where is his mate?

Again, I hunkered down in my hiding place under the fir tree next to the thick pine. Again, about half an hour later I heard the beautiful, clear, xylophone-like female calls from the northwest, and they were repeated, coming closer every few seconds. As before,
three
ravens came to the nest as a group, flying wing-tip to wing-tip. All three flew directly to the nest or within several feet of it. I again heard a female’s food-beg. Within several seconds, one bird left and flew back in the same direction that they had all come. Just as before. The pair remained at the nest for a minute, making soft conversational comfort sounds, then they perched in the pines by the nest. Unfortunately, this time they discovered me, and both made alarm calls and left. When I returned a week later, the nest had been abandoned.