Did you know that ravens and their cousins, crows, are incredibly intelligent? Well, neither did I – until recently.
Years ago, I was reading a Charles Dickens’ novel called “Barnaby Rudge.” I groaned while reading because one of its “characters” is a raven named Grip who is more intelligent than many of the humans in that book. Grip was always chattering, using human words, figuring things out.
“Ah, c’mon, Dickens,” I kept thinking. “No bird is that smart!”
Oh well, I kept reading because that exaggeratedly super-smart bird was so entertaining.
Recently, I received a message from an email “pen pal” of mine, Kim Steinle, who lives in an enchanting “storybook-style” house in the woods by a lake near Alexandria. Kim is not only a riveting writer, she is a keen-eyed, perceptive, passionate observer of nature, very much like Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), the towering American naturalist and author of “Walden.”
This is what Kim wrote:
“I’m watching the high intelligence of the crows in their selection of the types of invaders they deem threatening (pretty much exclusively the owls, hawks and eagles). They also scream in unison, alerting the squirrels to take to the trees whenever the fox comes. I’ve sometimes wondered how they have come to know that those particular creatures are a danger. I wondered if they had witnessed those predators actually kill a squirrel, chipmunk or rabbit. I am very sure they have. The squirrels and chipmunks are the crows’ little friends. They spend hours a day side by side together under the feeders, and never have I witnessed the slightest hint of antagonistic behavior between them.”
One day Kim witnessed a stray dog wander in winter into the woods and kill a squirrel. And then she saw crows gather by the dead critter, as if they were wondering what is wrong or what they could do to help.
“I know the wild creatures develop bonds,” Kim wrote, noting that crows often squawk with loud warning alarms when they see a fox or hawk in the woods. “I’m sure the crows with their extreme intelligence have empathy and concern and have come to know who needs to be kept out of the woods.”
Kim sent me a video of a crow placing a hard-shelled nut on a road. A car came along and crushed the shell. The waiting crow flew back right away to eat the spilled contents.
I flashed back to Dickens and his all-knowing raven, Grip. Then I did some research. What I learned was jaw-dropping.
Like parrots, ravens are adept at mimicking the words spoken by human beings, as well as other sounds in the environment. Ravens (and crows) vocalize in all kinds of interactions – alarm calls, chase calls and flight calls. If a raven is lost, one or more ravens will mimic that particular bird’s unique vocalizations to encourage it to return.
The brains of ravens are among the largest of any bird species. Those birds (and crows) are known to be expert problem-solvers and use cognitive processes such as imitation. They can also communicate to one another about things distant in space or time so that if a raven spots, say, a food source, it returns to the others to let them know where it is. Bees and ants do that too.
At 4 months old, ravens do as well as adult chimps on tests for causal reasoning, social learning, theory of mind and the use of tools.
The birds also love to play games and mischievous tricks.
Now, back to Dickens. He had a beloved raven named Grip (same name as the raven in his novel). When Grip died, the devastated Dickens had it stuffed and placed the bird in a glass case above his writing desk. Grip also inspired Edgar Allan Poe, who knew Dickens, to write his famous poem, “The Raven.”
The immortal Grip can still be seen on display in a Philadelphia museum. Long live ravens – and crows!