Old Man of the Mountains
~
The Northern Raven
First published in the October 2006 issue of Virginia Wildlife magazine
April 4th, Hawksbill Mountain overlook, Shenandoah National Park. A warm bright afternoon, hushed with the expectant feeling of early spring. Clouds of gnats swarm smokily before me in procreative ecstasies. The vast ringing silence, arching over the Shenandoah Valley below, is occasionally impinged upon by the surf-like roar of trucks on Highway 211 as they highball into the small town of Luray, 4,049 feet straight down.
Across the valley, where emerald fields of winter wheat and pastel-budded trees give assertive evidence of the sun’s return, the Alleghenies troop away to the northeast and southwest in hulking columns paralleling the Blue Ridge. Through the thick living April air I see Massanutten Mountain looming murkily to the west. Up here, the bare rock cliffs and naked deciduous trees speak of a winter only recently departed: dun clumps of dry grass, lichen-scaled boulders and outcrops of ancient limestone sprawl below my deserted overlook, flanked by stunted red spruce and leafless yellow birch. Above, romantic turkey vultures revolve about each other in mute spirals.
In this utter stillness one can almost hear the trees breathing. As I watch a file of ants vanishing into a crevice in the rock face at my feet, from far away, or so it seems, there comes floating down, like a feather, the ethereal croaking call of the raven.
Looking up with binoculars I see a black cruciform image with pointed wings and a long, wedge-shaped tail floating far up in the blue. He gives another distant yelping cry and is immediately answered; a second raven glides motionlessly toward him from over my shoulder and rapidly closes the distance. They circle one another in perfect synchronization, and only the absolute quiet of my lone lookout allows me to hear their distant murmured conversation of seemingly tender burblings and awks.
Suddenly one bird folds his wings and plunges toward the valley like a stone; the other bird, after completing her circle (I assign the sexes arbitrarily), follows in a steep spiraling descent with wings half extended and legs down, making a series of loud bell-like trills. Her mate’s precipitous swoop had taken him almost to the valley floor, from which he rises with seemingly undiminished speed in a tight arc that terminates just below the slowly downspiraling female, and as she appears above him he flips upside-down and grasps her claws with his, then holding each other in total silence they plummet straight down with all four wings held out at full length over their backs, rotating one over the other like the vanes of a collapsing windmill as they tumble in a vertical drop of thousands of feet.
Fifty yards or less from a jumble of limestone boulders the pair gracefully separate, like disengaging dancers, and with one accord peel skyward again with consummate grace and skill. Everything that falls must diverge; the two mated ravens, having impressed each other once again of their lifelong devotion, resume their solemn ascending spirals until they are quite lost in the sun.
What is the raven? The northern or common raven (Corvus corax) is a circumpolar species and was once present throughout North America, Europe, the North African coast and northern and central Asia. The largest songbird in North America, Virginia’s ravens (subspecies principalis) have a wingspan of over four feet, a length of 27 inches from bill to tail and weigh in at 2.7 pounds and more, four times as heavy as their crow cousins. Raven feathers are a rich lustrous ebony, occasionally revealing a metallic gloss of green or deep purple.
The heavy, powerful black bill, up to 3.25 inches long, is slightly hooked at the end of the upper mandible, indicative of the birds’ penchant for meat. The nostrils are hidden beneath thick bristling whiskers and a shaggy beard of throat feathers can be ruffed out to nearly touch the ground. Ravens are often mistaken for common crows (Corvus brachyrhinchos) but besides being a good deal larger they exhibit an even more involved social behavior. From below flying ravens show distinct, hawk-like “fingers” in their extended primary feathers, and their tails are long and taper to an obtuse triangle. Their flight, which can include barrel-rolls, steep dives and remarkable bursts of speed, also features prolonged bouts of full-winged soaring, a trait crows are incapable of and which has prompted hawk watchers to designate ravens as “honorary raptors.”
Ravens mate for life. Both sexes build the bulky nest of freshly broken limbs, usually under an overhang on a lonely rock cliff or tall in an isolated evergreen tree, and both tend to the young, the male bringing food to the female who typically broods 4 or 5 speckled blue-green eggs from early March to mid-April.
Generally ravens seek nesting areas remote from the noisy activities of mankind, a preference which led to their local demise by the early part of the last century as much of Virginia’s mature forestland had by then been obliterated. As with many of our rare and wilderness-loving species, the protection from development of federal lands in the mountainous west and the institution of science-based hunting regulations has led to the raven’s resurgence: the Virginia Department of Game & Inland Fisheries now lists the species as “common” in 28 counties and a “known resident” in 41.
Ravens are omnivorous, eating all manner of insects, fruit, eggs, nestlings, small vertebrates and unspoiled carrion. They are a highly intelligent and opportunistic species, more than willing to take advantage of edible human garbage if allowed to and almost incredibly adept at locating and benefiting from hunters’ refuse. Taxonomists view the corvids - ravens, crows, magpies, jays and their kin - as the earth’s most rapidly evolving family of birds, characterized by superior intellect, large size, a tendency toward ground foraging and open spaces, and astonishing powers of adaptation.
The foraging behavior of ravens is indicative of their versatility. Judging from regurgitated castings of indigestible material (hair, bone, toenails), ravens actively hunt a wide range of small rodents but also possess the ability to subdue larger prey such as rabbits, pigeons and ptarmigan. Their ability to seek out carcasses is legendary, a crucial skill which allows them to survive the long winters of their northern range. Ranchers have long distrusted the raven, claiming that it kills newborn lambs and calves. But over the course of several years’ conducting autopsies of lambs found dead with ravens in attendance, researchers in Germany have demonstrated that the vast majority of the livestock being fed upon had died of genetic defects or crippling sickness before the birds ever noticed them; seeing dead or dying animals below, the entrepreneurial ravens had merely taken advantage of the immediate situation.
Animals with complex social structures, such as humans, whales, and ravens, rely upon extensive and intricate vocalizations to make themselves understood in their societies. Raven calls are notoriously varied: some of the old mountain men say that if you hear an unidentifiable animal noise in the woods, it’s probably a raven. In Our Southern Highlanders, his classic book of early 1900s Appalachian life, Horace Kephart notes that “the raven croaks, clucks, caws, chuckles, squalls, pleads, grunts, barks, mimics small birds, hectors, cajoles - yes, pulls a cork, whets a scythe, files a saw - all with his throat.” In fact ravens are believed to have greater diversity of vocal patterns than any other animal except humans.
Biologist Richard N. Conner, formerly of Virginia Tech, recorded a bewildering series of raven calls in Virginia’s southwestern mountains: “Caw, growllike, whine, rattle, cawlup, staccato caw, awk, cluck, kow, bell-like, ku-uk-kuk, ko-pick, awk-up, woo-o-woo, uvular, o-ot, puddle and ke-aw.” Each of these distinct calls, given in numerous patterns and arrangements, means something specific to the intended audience, and interpreting “ravenese” is even more daunting when we realize that these birds, like us, have distinct regional dialects or accents that differ greatly with distance. For a language of Holarctic range the opportunities for linguistic variance are practically inexhaustible.
Their sheer capability for sound has caused scientists to despair of ever coming to grips with what ravens are saying to each other. Here we have an animal, one that flies above the heads of a good percentage of the Commonwealth’s population, which aside from its own vast and inimitable vocabulary can easily mimic other birds, dogs barking, running water, church bells, gunfire, diesel engines, and the most intimate inflections of human speech. And it is their facility to produce such a broad repertoire of sounds and calls that first galvanized scientific interest in the raven’s fabled intelligence.
Ravens have a higher rate of “encephalization,” or brain mass relative to body size, than any other bird, and stories of incredible feats of raven mental prowess are legion. There’s the individual who carefully laid walnuts down on a street for traffic to break for him and the raven who dropped clams from great heights onto rocks; the female observed deliberately poking holes in the bottom of her nest to provide ventilation for her overheated chicks; the other that soaked herself in a cold stream then returned and to cool her fledglings with her wet breast feathers; the repetitive use of sticks and bones as tools; cooperative raids conducted by ravens against wolves, dogs, bears and raptors, in which individuals take turns providing distraction while others fly in to steal food; and finally the numerous reports of ravens accumulating a pile of food items, then flying off with them all at once - cleverly stacked or entwined - rather than leaving them behind and unguarded.
Play, particularly among adult animals, is viewed by sociobiologists as indicative of higher intelligence: the necessities of life such as food and security having been taken care of, species including wolves, dogs, humans and ravens regularly take part in recreational activity that strengthens social bonds. Raven play, unobserved in any other birds save parrots, can involve pranks and gentle vandalism, snow-sliding contests, hanging upside-down and yodeling, and playing tag, catch-the-stick and keep-away. Toys are also recruited by playful ravens, a behavior known elsewhere only among primates, canines and dolphins.
Games can lead to more serious performances, as raven “culture” seems to value bravery as much as our own. Dominant males, after calling in their mates and subordinate birds as witnesses, will cautiously approach an uncertain food source such as a frozen carcass, touch it (usually with a swift kick), then strut back to their audience in full courtship display of ruffled throat and head feathers and raised wings to the screams of their apparently delighted onlookers.
If a carcass or similarly uncertain food source isn’t to be found, riskier alternatives like feeding wolves or raptors are tested. Scientists see a logical explanation for this potentially dangerous behavior (which sounds similar to the Plains Indian warriors’ custom of counting coup) in the territorial imperative: males must provide food for their mates in breeding season, and to claim and secure food sources the male must hold a defined territory through social dominance. Bringing the female and subordinates to the food source (or alternatively to riskier encounters) and displaying mastery over the situation proves the male’s continuing ability to find, control and provide sustenance in a protected environment.
For much of the year foraging is a relatively simple process, but the winter months, even here in the relatively balmy Appalachians, bring enormous challenges to nonmigratory species. It was their remarkable ability to find food under any circumstances that initially intrigued Dr. Bernd Heinrich, a professor of biology at the University of Vermont, author of two essential raven books and perhaps the country’s foremost expert on Corvus corax. Over the course of several years in the New England woods, Heinrich observed paired couples actively defending scarce food sources (usually winter-killed deer) from other ravens, but single birds, presumably unmated, were seen to loudly call for others to join them at the carcass, an instance of seeming altruism unrecorded in avian behavior.
Through exhaustive experimentation Heinrich concluded that the singles were juveniles dispersed from their natal range and living with other unmated birds at communal roosts. Highly cautious of traps or ambushes on the ground, a young raven finding a carcass calls in other singles so as to gather strength in numbers, thereby not only gaining access to the food source but potentially increasing its social status and its desirability as a mate and provider.
This deliberate sharing of food, a seeming sacrifice of immediate gluttony for long-term ends, had previously been unrevealed and has led other scientists to regard the raven as sociobiologically unique among nonhuman animals.
An evolutionary product of the barren grounds and immense coniferous forests of the northern hemisphere’s sub-arctic taiga, the carnivorous raven has for millennia depended upon large predators to secure prey for them. Bernd Heinrich says that “Ravens associate with any animals that kill large game: polar bears, grizzlies, wolves, coyotes, killer whales, and humans. All large-scale northern hunters have their retinues of attending ravens. In the Arctic the Inuit and other native peoples know when the caribou arrive on their migrations by the announcements of the ravens who travel with them and feed on the kills of the wolves along the flanks of the herds.”
Ravens are even known to intentionally call out to hunting wolves when they find likely prey, then through agility and teamwork claim a share of the resulting kill. Working together, ravens have been observed taking turns pulling a wolf’s (or an eagle’s) tail while another raven swoops in to seize a chunk of meat. Given their flexible foraging behavior it is no surprise that with the advent of humans in their midst ravens became equally skilled at “cooperating” with these new and deadly efficient hunters.
From our earliest days as a species humans have glorified and enshrined those animals whose abilities most impressed them. Through Paleolithic rock carvings, the battle pennants of medieval knights and the monikers of professional football teams, we seek to absorb valued attributes of our animal kin for our own use. The raven’s image was painted in the caves at Lascaux along with mammoths and cave bears. The Kwakuitl and other Northwestern Amerindian tribes experienced the raven god Kwekwaxa'we as a Promethean creator and carved his great bill into their totem poles. English fishing villages panicked when the Viking dragonships came from across the North Sea, stylized ravens painted on their billowing sails.
The early Scandinavians, like all Northern peoples, revered the knowledge and cunning of ravn; their god Odin the Allfather deployed two ravens named Thought and Memory each morning to gather news of the world. Ravens had doubtless led ancient Nordic hunters to game as they did and do hunters in Siberia and North America. But ravens and other scavengers are indiscriminate about the carcasses they feast upon, and will as readily take advantage of a warrior’s as a hunter’s leavings. Indeed, ravens and their Old World corvid cousins—hooded and carrion crows—were regular attendants upon European battlefields and so became ingrained in the Western mind as harbingers of slaughter and death. In Beowulf we read that “the swept harp/ won’t waken warriors, but the raven winging/ darkly over the doomed will have news,/ tidings for the eagle of how he hoked and ate,/ how the wolf and he made short work of the dead.”
This Anglo-Saxon image of the “grim and ghastly raven” eventually became transplanted to the Americas, where along with other unconscious baggage (such as a vicious prejudice concerning wolves) it helped excuse depredations against ravens until quite recently. The image of raven as prophet of evil found its most persuasive advocate, of course, in Edgar Allan Poe, with Jefferson still much Virginia’s finest writer. Poe’s uninvited guest from “the Night’s Plutonian shore” served only to confirm, relentlessly, the narrator’s doom-struck hopelessness ... the result, as if often the case, of love irretrievably lost. For Poe’s midnight-moored protagonist there would be no balm in Gilead, during that long night in bleak December or at any other time; the raven upon which he transferred his angst spoke of his own inner negation.
But for those who cherish what fragments we’ve managed to preserve of Virginia’s native heritage, the wilderness-dependent raven must be a shining symbol of hope for what we may yet do to save and reclaim the habitat of our remaining wildlife. The northern raven, enigmatic, gregarious, eerily intelligent, is no longer a portent of doom—his distant raucous croak speaks instead of the faith we still maintain that wild places and wild animals may yet be afforded the protection they need to work out their separate destinies amid our dominion.
Across the valley, where emerald fields of winter wheat and pastel-budded trees give assertive evidence of the sun’s return, the Alleghenies troop away to the northeast and southwest in hulking columns paralleling the Blue Ridge. Through the thick living April air I see Massanutten Mountain looming murkily to the west. Up here, the bare rock cliffs and naked deciduous trees speak of a winter only recently departed: dun clumps of dry grass, lichen-scaled boulders and outcrops of ancient limestone sprawl below my deserted overlook, flanked by stunted red spruce and leafless yellow birch. Above, romantic turkey vultures revolve about each other in mute spirals.
In this utter stillness one can almost hear the trees breathing. As I watch a file of ants vanishing into a crevice in the rock face at my feet, from far away, or so it seems, there comes floating down, like a feather, the ethereal croaking call of the raven.
Looking up with binoculars I see a black cruciform image with pointed wings and a long, wedge-shaped tail floating far up in the blue. He gives another distant yelping cry and is immediately answered; a second raven glides motionlessly toward him from over my shoulder and rapidly closes the distance. They circle one another in perfect synchronization, and only the absolute quiet of my lone lookout allows me to hear their distant murmured conversation of seemingly tender burblings and awks.
Suddenly one bird folds his wings and plunges toward the valley like a stone; the other bird, after completing her circle (I assign the sexes arbitrarily), follows in a steep spiraling descent with wings half extended and legs down, making a series of loud bell-like trills. Her mate’s precipitous swoop had taken him almost to the valley floor, from which he rises with seemingly undiminished speed in a tight arc that terminates just below the slowly downspiraling female, and as she appears above him he flips upside-down and grasps her claws with his, then holding each other in total silence they plummet straight down with all four wings held out at full length over their backs, rotating one over the other like the vanes of a collapsing windmill as they tumble in a vertical drop of thousands of feet.
Fifty yards or less from a jumble of limestone boulders the pair gracefully separate, like disengaging dancers, and with one accord peel skyward again with consummate grace and skill. Everything that falls must diverge; the two mated ravens, having impressed each other once again of their lifelong devotion, resume their solemn ascending spirals until they are quite lost in the sun.
What is the raven? The northern or common raven (Corvus corax) is a circumpolar species and was once present throughout North America, Europe, the North African coast and northern and central Asia. The largest songbird in North America, Virginia’s ravens (subspecies principalis) have a wingspan of over four feet, a length of 27 inches from bill to tail and weigh in at 2.7 pounds and more, four times as heavy as their crow cousins. Raven feathers are a rich lustrous ebony, occasionally revealing a metallic gloss of green or deep purple.
The heavy, powerful black bill, up to 3.25 inches long, is slightly hooked at the end of the upper mandible, indicative of the birds’ penchant for meat. The nostrils are hidden beneath thick bristling whiskers and a shaggy beard of throat feathers can be ruffed out to nearly touch the ground. Ravens are often mistaken for common crows (Corvus brachyrhinchos) but besides being a good deal larger they exhibit an even more involved social behavior. From below flying ravens show distinct, hawk-like “fingers” in their extended primary feathers, and their tails are long and taper to an obtuse triangle. Their flight, which can include barrel-rolls, steep dives and remarkable bursts of speed, also features prolonged bouts of full-winged soaring, a trait crows are incapable of and which has prompted hawk watchers to designate ravens as “honorary raptors.”
Ravens mate for life. Both sexes build the bulky nest of freshly broken limbs, usually under an overhang on a lonely rock cliff or tall in an isolated evergreen tree, and both tend to the young, the male bringing food to the female who typically broods 4 or 5 speckled blue-green eggs from early March to mid-April.
Generally ravens seek nesting areas remote from the noisy activities of mankind, a preference which led to their local demise by the early part of the last century as much of Virginia’s mature forestland had by then been obliterated. As with many of our rare and wilderness-loving species, the protection from development of federal lands in the mountainous west and the institution of science-based hunting regulations has led to the raven’s resurgence: the Virginia Department of Game & Inland Fisheries now lists the species as “common” in 28 counties and a “known resident” in 41.
Ravens are omnivorous, eating all manner of insects, fruit, eggs, nestlings, small vertebrates and unspoiled carrion. They are a highly intelligent and opportunistic species, more than willing to take advantage of edible human garbage if allowed to and almost incredibly adept at locating and benefiting from hunters’ refuse. Taxonomists view the corvids - ravens, crows, magpies, jays and their kin - as the earth’s most rapidly evolving family of birds, characterized by superior intellect, large size, a tendency toward ground foraging and open spaces, and astonishing powers of adaptation.
The foraging behavior of ravens is indicative of their versatility. Judging from regurgitated castings of indigestible material (hair, bone, toenails), ravens actively hunt a wide range of small rodents but also possess the ability to subdue larger prey such as rabbits, pigeons and ptarmigan. Their ability to seek out carcasses is legendary, a crucial skill which allows them to survive the long winters of their northern range. Ranchers have long distrusted the raven, claiming that it kills newborn lambs and calves. But over the course of several years’ conducting autopsies of lambs found dead with ravens in attendance, researchers in Germany have demonstrated that the vast majority of the livestock being fed upon had died of genetic defects or crippling sickness before the birds ever noticed them; seeing dead or dying animals below, the entrepreneurial ravens had merely taken advantage of the immediate situation.
Animals with complex social structures, such as humans, whales, and ravens, rely upon extensive and intricate vocalizations to make themselves understood in their societies. Raven calls are notoriously varied: some of the old mountain men say that if you hear an unidentifiable animal noise in the woods, it’s probably a raven. In Our Southern Highlanders, his classic book of early 1900s Appalachian life, Horace Kephart notes that “the raven croaks, clucks, caws, chuckles, squalls, pleads, grunts, barks, mimics small birds, hectors, cajoles - yes, pulls a cork, whets a scythe, files a saw - all with his throat.” In fact ravens are believed to have greater diversity of vocal patterns than any other animal except humans.
Biologist Richard N. Conner, formerly of Virginia Tech, recorded a bewildering series of raven calls in Virginia’s southwestern mountains: “Caw, growllike, whine, rattle, cawlup, staccato caw, awk, cluck, kow, bell-like, ku-uk-kuk, ko-pick, awk-up, woo-o-woo, uvular, o-ot, puddle and ke-aw.” Each of these distinct calls, given in numerous patterns and arrangements, means something specific to the intended audience, and interpreting “ravenese” is even more daunting when we realize that these birds, like us, have distinct regional dialects or accents that differ greatly with distance. For a language of Holarctic range the opportunities for linguistic variance are practically inexhaustible.
Their sheer capability for sound has caused scientists to despair of ever coming to grips with what ravens are saying to each other. Here we have an animal, one that flies above the heads of a good percentage of the Commonwealth’s population, which aside from its own vast and inimitable vocabulary can easily mimic other birds, dogs barking, running water, church bells, gunfire, diesel engines, and the most intimate inflections of human speech. And it is their facility to produce such a broad repertoire of sounds and calls that first galvanized scientific interest in the raven’s fabled intelligence.
Ravens have a higher rate of “encephalization,” or brain mass relative to body size, than any other bird, and stories of incredible feats of raven mental prowess are legion. There’s the individual who carefully laid walnuts down on a street for traffic to break for him and the raven who dropped clams from great heights onto rocks; the female observed deliberately poking holes in the bottom of her nest to provide ventilation for her overheated chicks; the other that soaked herself in a cold stream then returned and to cool her fledglings with her wet breast feathers; the repetitive use of sticks and bones as tools; cooperative raids conducted by ravens against wolves, dogs, bears and raptors, in which individuals take turns providing distraction while others fly in to steal food; and finally the numerous reports of ravens accumulating a pile of food items, then flying off with them all at once - cleverly stacked or entwined - rather than leaving them behind and unguarded.
Play, particularly among adult animals, is viewed by sociobiologists as indicative of higher intelligence: the necessities of life such as food and security having been taken care of, species including wolves, dogs, humans and ravens regularly take part in recreational activity that strengthens social bonds. Raven play, unobserved in any other birds save parrots, can involve pranks and gentle vandalism, snow-sliding contests, hanging upside-down and yodeling, and playing tag, catch-the-stick and keep-away. Toys are also recruited by playful ravens, a behavior known elsewhere only among primates, canines and dolphins.
Games can lead to more serious performances, as raven “culture” seems to value bravery as much as our own. Dominant males, after calling in their mates and subordinate birds as witnesses, will cautiously approach an uncertain food source such as a frozen carcass, touch it (usually with a swift kick), then strut back to their audience in full courtship display of ruffled throat and head feathers and raised wings to the screams of their apparently delighted onlookers.
If a carcass or similarly uncertain food source isn’t to be found, riskier alternatives like feeding wolves or raptors are tested. Scientists see a logical explanation for this potentially dangerous behavior (which sounds similar to the Plains Indian warriors’ custom of counting coup) in the territorial imperative: males must provide food for their mates in breeding season, and to claim and secure food sources the male must hold a defined territory through social dominance. Bringing the female and subordinates to the food source (or alternatively to riskier encounters) and displaying mastery over the situation proves the male’s continuing ability to find, control and provide sustenance in a protected environment.
For much of the year foraging is a relatively simple process, but the winter months, even here in the relatively balmy Appalachians, bring enormous challenges to nonmigratory species. It was their remarkable ability to find food under any circumstances that initially intrigued Dr. Bernd Heinrich, a professor of biology at the University of Vermont, author of two essential raven books and perhaps the country’s foremost expert on Corvus corax. Over the course of several years in the New England woods, Heinrich observed paired couples actively defending scarce food sources (usually winter-killed deer) from other ravens, but single birds, presumably unmated, were seen to loudly call for others to join them at the carcass, an instance of seeming altruism unrecorded in avian behavior.
Through exhaustive experimentation Heinrich concluded that the singles were juveniles dispersed from their natal range and living with other unmated birds at communal roosts. Highly cautious of traps or ambushes on the ground, a young raven finding a carcass calls in other singles so as to gather strength in numbers, thereby not only gaining access to the food source but potentially increasing its social status and its desirability as a mate and provider.
This deliberate sharing of food, a seeming sacrifice of immediate gluttony for long-term ends, had previously been unrevealed and has led other scientists to regard the raven as sociobiologically unique among nonhuman animals.
An evolutionary product of the barren grounds and immense coniferous forests of the northern hemisphere’s sub-arctic taiga, the carnivorous raven has for millennia depended upon large predators to secure prey for them. Bernd Heinrich says that “Ravens associate with any animals that kill large game: polar bears, grizzlies, wolves, coyotes, killer whales, and humans. All large-scale northern hunters have their retinues of attending ravens. In the Arctic the Inuit and other native peoples know when the caribou arrive on their migrations by the announcements of the ravens who travel with them and feed on the kills of the wolves along the flanks of the herds.”
Ravens are even known to intentionally call out to hunting wolves when they find likely prey, then through agility and teamwork claim a share of the resulting kill. Working together, ravens have been observed taking turns pulling a wolf’s (or an eagle’s) tail while another raven swoops in to seize a chunk of meat. Given their flexible foraging behavior it is no surprise that with the advent of humans in their midst ravens became equally skilled at “cooperating” with these new and deadly efficient hunters.
From our earliest days as a species humans have glorified and enshrined those animals whose abilities most impressed them. Through Paleolithic rock carvings, the battle pennants of medieval knights and the monikers of professional football teams, we seek to absorb valued attributes of our animal kin for our own use. The raven’s image was painted in the caves at Lascaux along with mammoths and cave bears. The Kwakuitl and other Northwestern Amerindian tribes experienced the raven god Kwekwaxa'we as a Promethean creator and carved his great bill into their totem poles. English fishing villages panicked when the Viking dragonships came from across the North Sea, stylized ravens painted on their billowing sails.
The early Scandinavians, like all Northern peoples, revered the knowledge and cunning of ravn; their god Odin the Allfather deployed two ravens named Thought and Memory each morning to gather news of the world. Ravens had doubtless led ancient Nordic hunters to game as they did and do hunters in Siberia and North America. But ravens and other scavengers are indiscriminate about the carcasses they feast upon, and will as readily take advantage of a warrior’s as a hunter’s leavings. Indeed, ravens and their Old World corvid cousins—hooded and carrion crows—were regular attendants upon European battlefields and so became ingrained in the Western mind as harbingers of slaughter and death. In Beowulf we read that “the swept harp/ won’t waken warriors, but the raven winging/ darkly over the doomed will have news,/ tidings for the eagle of how he hoked and ate,/ how the wolf and he made short work of the dead.”
This Anglo-Saxon image of the “grim and ghastly raven” eventually became transplanted to the Americas, where along with other unconscious baggage (such as a vicious prejudice concerning wolves) it helped excuse depredations against ravens until quite recently. The image of raven as prophet of evil found its most persuasive advocate, of course, in Edgar Allan Poe, with Jefferson still much Virginia’s finest writer. Poe’s uninvited guest from “the Night’s Plutonian shore” served only to confirm, relentlessly, the narrator’s doom-struck hopelessness ... the result, as if often the case, of love irretrievably lost. For Poe’s midnight-moored protagonist there would be no balm in Gilead, during that long night in bleak December or at any other time; the raven upon which he transferred his angst spoke of his own inner negation.
But for those who cherish what fragments we’ve managed to preserve of Virginia’s native heritage, the wilderness-dependent raven must be a shining symbol of hope for what we may yet do to save and reclaim the habitat of our remaining wildlife. The northern raven, enigmatic, gregarious, eerily intelligent, is no longer a portent of doom—his distant raucous croak speaks instead of the faith we still maintain that wild places and wild animals may yet be afforded the protection they need to work out their separate destinies amid our dominion.
