I was driving past Old North Cemetery in Truro a couple of weeks ago when I saw a bird flying upside down. It soon flipped back over, completing an awkward barrel roll beneath another bird. The two massive, dark birds with diamond tails were flying in sync, chasing each other across the sky. They were ravens, one of the many pairs to make their home on the Outer Cape, and I was witnessing their courtship.
Ravens became a rarity here, driven out of the state by hunting and habitat loss in the 19th century, but in the late 20th century they began making a comeback. They reached Cape Cod in 2012, and today, ravens breed in every town on the Outer Cape.
Despite their reputation in the English-speaking world as macabre portents of doom — truly, few people have more effectively tarnished a creature’s reputation than Edgar Allen Poe has — ravens are harbingers of spring. In late February, while many animals here are asleep, absent, or weakened by winter hardship, our ravens have paired up and may already be laying eggs.
Raven courtship of the kind I saw in Truro is a sight to behold. The bonded pair flies together, the top bird swooping down while the bottom bird flips, dodges, and barrel rolls to meet the claws of the top bird. The two birds sometimes lock talons as they soar over the landscape. They also engage in other acts of bonding, like mutual grooming and scratching, and they give each other food. Ravens typically mate for life.
These birds are also intelligent. They can use tools, learn and remember tasks, and hold grudges against human researchers who make unfair trades with them in experiments. Some would argue that ravens are among the smartest animals on the planet, up there with humans, whales, and great apes. A group of German researchers led by biologist Simone Pika found that, when given an intelligence test called the Primate Cognition Test Battery, a raven can, at four months old, perform as well as an adult chimpanzee.
This intelligence has given ravens the capacity to have strikingly complex social relationships. They will cache food, but they risk having their caches stolen by other ravens. So, they will sometimes pretend to cache food, then wait to catch another raven trying to steal from the empty hiding place. In their circles, being duplicitous can have consequences — ravens that cheat during cooperative tasks will sometimes be ostracized by other ravens.
Perhaps most impressive of all these social behaviors is that ravens can accurately communicate information vocally. Juvenile ravens roost communally but often forage alone, writes linguist Derek Bickerton in his 2009 book, Adam’s Tongue. He goes on to describe how, when one juvenile finds a carcass guarded by a pair of mated adults, it returns to the roost to communicate its find to the other ravens there. The next day, several young ravens will fly to the carcass together in order to chase off the adults. This behavior, Bickerton argues, proves that ravens can communicate something that is distant in both time and space, which makes them the only vertebrate other than humans that we know to do so.
Ravens seem to enjoy playing, too. Juvenile ravens have been seen sledding down snowbanks on plastic lids, making snowballs, and chasing mammals around for no apparent reason other than their own pleasure. In his 1999 book, Mind of the Raven, Bernd Heinrich writes that ravens are among the few animals that make their own toys — juvenile ravens have been seen breaking off sticks for play.
One group of people who recognize just how intelligent ravens are is the Haida, an Indigenous First Nation in the Pacific Northwest. For the Haida, the Raven is a powerful being who “had always existed and always would,” as Haida artist Bill Reid and Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst wrote in their collaborative telling of Haida mythology, The Raven Steals the Light.
In one origin story, the Raven finds humanity in a clam shell and cracks it open. In another, Reid and Bringhurst retell how, long ago, when the world was cast in darkness, the Raven discovered that a man was hiding the light of the world in a box within many more boxes. The bird, not willing to stand for this, tricks the man’s daughter to open the boxes. And so, “the world was at once transformed … and everywhere life began to stir.”
A genius and a powerful trickster with a strong sense of justice. That, more than Poe’s “nevermore” croaker, is the raven that I recognize.
