Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (16 page)

July 22, 1995, was a scorching hot day with temperatures near 90 degrees Fahrenheit. After I poured the water into the tub, Fuzz came
down and walked right in. He ducked and splashed until all of his feathers were comically matted into tufts, streaming water. Bath done, he flew up to the roost to preen, and only then did Goliath cautiously approach the water. Fuzz would normally preen for a half hour, but seeing Goliath approach the water to enjoy a bath, he interrupted his preening and flew back down, still totally soaked, to take another leisurely bath. When finished, he went back up to his perch to resume his preening. Having barely started, he again stopped to chase Goliath, who had attempted to reach the water once more. This sequence was repeated eight separate times before Fuzz finally allowed Goliath to bathe, or he allowed himself to preen. I could see no practical point to his costly exertions to exclude Goliath from a bath, except maybe to show that he could do it. There are people like that, but I was surprised to see ravens being so unreasonable.

When Goliath was finally allowed to bathe, he was continually interrupted by Whitefeather. She didn’t actually get into the tub with him, but came near, obviously intending to join him in the two-foot-diameter wheelbarrow bowl that was surely big enough for two. Goliath invariably interrupted his bath, however, just to chase his partner off. Long-paired partners become progressively more tolerant of each other, bathing and feeding together.

Houdi tried to be next. She was immediately chased off by Whitefeather even after Whitefeather was done bathing. During the time Whitefeather was trying to prevent Houdi from bathing, she kept giving her female power-call, the knocking. Houdi, in trying to sneak in to take a bath, kept looking all around at the others, as if to make sure they were preoccupied before she dared a try. They always saw her. Eventually, she gave up.

After four months I separated one pair from the other, not only to terminate the fidelity test, but also to permit each pair to eventually build a nest and raise young, since both pairs could not be expected to nest in the same aviary. I kept Fuzz and Houdi in their home aviary in Vermont, and brought Goliath and Whitefeather back to their aviary at my cabin and study site in Maine, where they had originally met.

On November 21, 1995, the day I separated the pairs, Houdi underwent a remarkable change. She regained her voice—and with a vengeance. She did the knocking calls continuously for hours on end. When the pairs had been together, Fuzz had bitten off the end of Goliath’s tongue. I had thought that possibly Goliath’s silence had been due to that injury. It wasn’t. As soon as he was away from Fuzz, he regained the full range of his voice with no change at all in his calls that I could tell, tongue or no tongue. He also resumed his macho displays.

Despite their separation, the stories of Fuzz and Houdi, and Goliath and Whitefeather, later became closely intertwined. By Christmas, Fuzz and Houdi were still the epitome of a loving couple, preening each other almost every minute of the day. He preened her about twice as often as she him. To solicit preening, she pursued him, perched right next to him, and bent her head over as he folded over one feather after another with his bill After a while, he reached under her throat, and she arched her head up over her back for him to preen her throat, feather by feather. I’ve never seen a single parasite on either one, although they did remove rare specks of dirt from the feathers. Fuzz did not seem to solicit preening from Houdi. Instead, he did many of his macho displays accompanied by
00-00
calls, while seeming to push her. Houdi responded with her knocking display, and occasionally placed her foot on his back. He sometimes sidled up to her, reached out with his nearest foot, and grasped hers firmly for many seconds at a time. I could not tell what the foot-grasping meant, except that sometimes it seemed as if it might be used as a mild restraint.

Houdi was playful. She slid and rolled down a two-foot-high mound of snow on her back. At first, the snow-sliding seemed almost like an afterthought as she simply allowed herself to topple over while Fuzz was preening her on top of the mound. After that, she did it several more times on her own.

On January 28, Houdi brought two sticks into the shed where I hoped they would nest. Fuzz took an immediate interest and followed her closely. When she brought the third stick up into the shed, he picked
one up, too, and followed her to the spot where she had deposited hers. Was she telling him something?

In the next two weeks, Fuzz alone carried sticks. He not only carried them to the designated spot for the nest, he also held them fast with his bill and rapidly vibrated his bill with the stick in it. Such vibrations normally function to anchor sticks to each other and to the nest substrate, but their nest-building seemed more like play. At first, as many sticks fell out as were carried up. Houdi accompanied Fuzz and watched him work; she carried no sticks herself. They were almost three years old. Were they too young to seriously build a nest? Perhaps all the neural connections necessary for nesting behavior had not yet been made or activated.

Almost a month later, on February 22, the nest still consisted only of a loose bundle of about ten sticks. Were they missing something? I put an old sheepskin with long tufts of wool into the aviary. Both looked at this material intently. He then grabbed a stick lying nearby and took it to the nest. She took a piece of sheep wool, shredded it, then carried it to the nest as well. Now he got busy! Again, as if he’d suddenly caught on from her cue, he began carrying more and more sticks in, even two at a time. In eighteen minutes, he had carried in eight sticks and she had brought up three loads of fur. Both had also played with more sticks and fur. When I gave them dead grass, she picked it up and carried it in one large load. After that one billful, she picked up a huge ash stick, one that was an inch thick and two and a half feet long. She debarked the stick, held it in one foot, and let it dangle below her before eventually carrying it to the nest. Then she was done. She sat on the nest edge, preened, and did many knocking calls. Did her actions tell him to get busy? It seemed so, because he started carrying in as many as three sticks at a time, although still ignoring the wool and grass.

Only one day later, Fuzz had finished the stick “basket.” I gave them piles of inner bark from a dead poplar. This they both carried into the nest, accompanying each other. Both were now almost equally engaged carrying load after load of bark fibers and wool. By the next day, Houdi was making three trips with nest lining to the
nest to his one. He still picked up sticks, dropped them, picked them up again, as though forgetting what they were for. It was only the lining that the nest then needed. The next day, February 27, the nest seemed ready. It had a beautiful, deep, soft lining. The whole structure measured thirty inches across and twenty inches tall, and the nest cup was twelve inches across and six inches deep. I expected eggs any day.

On March 8, I saw Houdi sit down in the empty nest, turning around in it several times, but sitting quietly most of the time without moving. After one of her nest-sitting sessions, from 8:19 to 8:35
A.M.
, I checked the nest, but it was empty. Fuzz still accompanied her every move, perching next to her even when she was in the nest. At 8:54, she again went into the nest to sit. After she sat for six minutes, she hopped out and he took his turn for four minutes. At 9:27
A.M.
, he hopped out and she sat quietly in the nest again for seven minutes, while he did his macho displays. He then took another turn for four minutes, while she did her knocking displays. She took two more turns of nest-sitting in the still-empty nest for nine minutes and three minutes, respectively. Several times, he laboriously picked hair off a moose hide I’d provided them, then spat it out and discarded it. Meanwhile, several times when she hopped off the nest onto the ground, he walked up to her to hold her foot, as she lay down on her side beside him. Were these preliminaries to sex?

The next morning as a wild raven flew over, Fuzz went into paroxysms of deep angry
quorking
. Later, he perched in uncharacteristic silence with a partially fuzzy head. At frequent intervals, his whole body shook and vibrated for a few seconds at a time. I had never seen him do that before, and would never see it again. He was not shivering from cold, because it was a warm day. I sensed a great excitement in him. Had he taken a cue, from the finished nest, that it was now time to mate?

Two mornings later, on March 10, 1996, I found the first egg in the nest. Houdi sat on it most of the day. Fuzz perched stolidly nearby for hours, making
oo-oo
calls, bill-snaps, macho displays, and undulating territorial calls.

Already at dawn the next morning, he began making long, deep, rasping, territorial
quorks
telling all neighbors to keep away. She was on the nest. He maintained high alert, looking around in all directions. At 6:30
A.M.
, she hopped out of the nest, stretched her right wing, and hopped over to him on his perch. He greeted her with his macho bill-clicking display, and she responded with her knocking display. He then waddled sideways to her along the perch and reached out with his right foot to grasp her left. She skooched down, arching her back and rotating her tail, and he hopped onto her back. He lost his balance, and she then flew to the ground. He followed. She crouched again, with rapid tail vibrations, and he responded with a similar crouch and tail vibration with his wings held widely to the side and his bill up at an angle of about forty degrees. He did this for only a second or two, then hopped onto her back again, perching directly on her, while maneuvering backward to make cloacal contact. In two to three seconds, it was all over, and she walked over to the calf carcass to feed. He flew back up to his perch. I quickly took the opportunity to check the nest. No second egg yet.

At 7:10
A.M.
, she hopped out of the nest and he hopped on, remaining there for forty-three minutes before she came back and perched next to him at the edge of the nest, making soft, throaty calls. He sat deep in the nest mold, unmoving, but later got off the nest while she was down below and feeding. He’d been off for only two minutes when she went up to the nest to resume incubation and/or to lay the second egg.

As I tried to approach the nest at 9:40
A.M.
to chase her off to check for a second egg, he got defensive for the first time. Indeed, his anger was downright intimidating. He puffed himself out, made the rapid
kek-kek-kek
alarm calls, and pounded the wood right next to me so hard that splinters flew. She, in turn, remained silent and refused to come off the nest. Was he feeling his testosterone? During breeding time, the testes of male birds increase in size more than thirty-fold. Testosterone supposedly increases aggression. But Houdi, presumably with little testosterone, was soon as aggressive toward me as Fuzz. She was so aggressive, I needed to resort to trickery to find out what was in the nest.

“Want to do an experiment?” I asked a friend who was visiting.

“Sure!”

“Okay—go up to the nest and see if there are two eggs in it.”

She did. And there were.

Neither bird tried to repel her. Neither made alarm calls. She had not interacted with the birds before, and should have been more threatening to them than I, who had raised them from chicks and whom they had trusted until that very moment. I wasn’t much surprised, through, because ravens are consistently surprising.

I needed more reliable access to the nest in the coming days and weeks, and since visitors were not available every day, I had to improvise. For the most part, I learned that I could hold them off by carrying something bulky in my hand. A paper bag would do. They never took my advances personally. Afterward, without holding a bulky object, I often sat for hours within five feet of them and the nest, and they both ignored me—provided I did not move toward it. My slightest movement towards the nest set them off in vehement threats that would make my heart pound, because I knew I’d get hammered. I expected fully that Houdi would fly in my face and peck hard.

Five eggs were laid, about twenty-five hours apart from each other. I marked each one with a small piece of numbered duct tape to record the sequence in the clutch.

Matings occurred almost precisely at the same time and in the same way at dawn every morning, and stopped on the morning that the fifth egg was laid. It was always the same ritual. Each mating was initiated when the female hopped off the nest to stretch on her first morning break. He sidled up to her and did his macho display. She responded with her knocking display. He then drooped his wings and vibrated his tail. She then went down, crouching in the same display, and he hopped on to mate.

Ravens have always been assumed to be monogamous and keep their mates for life. But as with almost everything about them, it depends strictly on circumstances. There is ample documentation in the literature showing that if one member of the pair gets killed, a replacement may appear within a day. Recently John Marzluff, who
has continued working with corvids in the western United States, documented extra-pair copulations in ravens inhabiting the open country in Idaho. He saw four males other than the mate (who was wing-tagged) copulate with a female, and he saw extra-pair copulations at the two nests under observations. John said “the sneakers wait until the exact moment when the territorial males leaves, which is very infrequently. They streamed in as soon as the male left. They would do this only at egg-laying time—exactly when it would result in fertilization.” Interestingly, these copulations differed from the ones I saw of the legitimate pairs. These extra-pair copulations occurred at any time, not just at dawn, and they occurred when the female was sitting and remained sitting on the nest, not off it. It seems as though the secondary males know what is going on, not only with regard to the precise reproductive status of a female and/or her nest other than theirs, as well as her mate’s mate-guarding behavior.