Kromakhy, Master of Ravens and Crows

(117) "Hello", the pet crow

2009-05-01T13:55:00.000+02:00

December 19, 1988
Good Bye, Hello
THE COMMON CROW IS AN UNCOMMONLY CHARMING BIRD, SAYS A MAN WHO KNOWS HIS FINE FEATHERED FRIENDS
Bil Gilbert

This is about crows and ravens in general and several individual ones I have known personally. There are about 40 species of what ornithologists call common crows, all members of the genus Corvus. They are distributed over most of the world, have developed some odd local customs and vary a bit in appearance. But functionally they are about as similar as Swedes and Swahilis, and here all of them will be called crows unless there is reason to do otherwise.

Crows, like humans, are omnivorous, able to eat more or less anything that does not eat them first; they are hardy and clever enough to prosper in virtually any environment on the planet, from polar to tropical regions. Since they have always been around us in substantial numbers and have a good many behavior patterns quite similar to our own, we have been keeping crows under surveillance for a long time (and, very likely, vice versa). To give our side first, here are some observations and thoughts about crows:

They have big brains, larger in proportion to their size, than any other avian species. Behavioral investigators in laboratories have given many laudatory testimonials to how well crows solve puzzles, manipulate locks and keys and learn to do simple counting exercises. In the field, where they are free to do as they please, crows have been found using tools and weapons held in their beaks. They employ sticks and spines as picks and probes. British bird-watchers trying to get at ravens' nests have been repeatedly showered with stones intentionally aimed at them by the dive-bombing birds.

Crows are obviously, incessantly and raucously communicative. Ordinarily, they employ a hundred or so meaningful expressions and gestures, but individual birds will creatively alter these root sounds and movements to expand their working vocabularies. Many crows are talented, enthusiastic mimics and, like PBS commentators or wine critics, are apt to sprinkle their conversations with foreign mots. I have known crows who used phrases they have picked up from cicadas, ducks, dogs and humans. That they can do the last is well known. There is no reason to believe that the raven did not quoth "Nevermore." And if indeed the bird did, the poet probably took it too seriously. I am persuaded that ravens don't know or much care what they are saying in such cases, but that they shout things like "Hello, Jake," mostly for the gaudy effect.

At times crows are notably, even hysterically, social. In the part of the world where I live—central Pennsylvania along the Mason-Dixon line—at the end of the working day during the fall and winter most of them gather in large flocks, sometimes consisting of as many as 75,000 birds. Then they roost together in clusters of trees, cheek by jowl, and spend the night gossiping, wrangling and sometimes sleeping. Come spring, however, the birds go off to look for single-family nesting territories. Once established in a nest, they are very secretive about its location. In the manner of New Jerseyites who have come by a ranchette retreat on a quarter of an acre in the Poconos, they belligerently drive off all trespassers, regardless of size, species, color or creed.

In principle, crows are monogamous, mating for life, which can last 20 years or more. Males and females both work at nest building and may take turns incubating the eggs and feeding the young. However, their principles, like ours, are sometimes violated, and at times they will do things that would be called adultery or rape if, say, a TV evangelist did likewise.

We can only guess at the motives of other creatures and can describe them only by making figurative analogies based on our own experience. It is therefore impossible to say with certainty why a crow will lie flat on its back and juggle a pinecone or toss and retrieve stones or perform acrobatics in the air or on the ground. It certainly looks as if it is playing, as we might say, engaged in an impractical and unnecessary, but agreeable, activity. Also, crows are known to do drugs, apparently (one must admit, in keeping with the foregoing reservations) for fun. Case studies of sporting and junkie crows will be provided in due course, but before that, some consideration should be given to the reverse perspective—what crows may know about us.

As is apparent to anyone who has tried to approach these birds, they clearly have learned that humans can be dangerous. However, this information does not terrify crows as it does many less bold and astute beasts. To the contrary, judging from their actions, they may well regard people in the way it is thought early people regarded fire—as a tricky but, on balance, magnificent gift of the gods.

The spread of what is sometimes referred to as civilization has been a disaster for some species, and even we have at times had doubts about whether its rewards are worth the price it exacts. In pursuit of our various agricultural, commercial and domestic interests, however, we have turned vast tracts of the planet into habitat that is much more attractive and richer for crows than was the howling wilderness. Thanks to us, the short-term prospects are that this world will become a better and better one for these birds.

In Arctic regions where I have sometimes gone, there are days when the only other living things to be seen are ravens, glumly pecking away at ice floes or glaciers, trying to get at frozen lemming scraps and such. The toughness and ingenuity of these Arctic-dwelling birds is impressive, but these ravens are atypical. To see many more—and more adaptable—ravens than are found in the Arctic wilderness, go to Fairbanks, Alaska, or Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, or similar modern northland communities that have dumpsters and landfills. In addition to the abundant refuse they offer, the streets of such towns are paved with the equivalent of raven's gold: road kills, mashed pizza, french fries, kiwi fruit parings and other loose garbage, which ravens find as nourishing as iced lemmings and much easier to get at.

Within 60 miles of where I live, I know of seven crow roosts, those big winter bedroom complexes. One of them is in a genuinely rural area, a woodlot surrounded by dairy farms, which are always good sources of crow chow. The other six are either in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area—the largest, a roost of about 10,000 birds, is hard by the Capital Beltway—or in sizable outlying towns such as the Maryland communities of Frederick and Hagerstown. Each of the urban roosts is close to a shopping center, and in each place the birds perch at night in trees left standing or planted by developers.

Besides being convenient to rich deposits of food, these roosts are especially secure ones for the birds. You can say what you want about crime in our cities, but the authorities there have pretty much stamped out recreational gunning, which traditionally is a much greater threat to crows than are shoot-outs between cops and robbers. In contrast, that old-fashioned rural roost I know has old-fashioned country problems. Fairly regularly, by the look of the carcasses on the ground, it is visited by people who have so little excitement in their lives that they can find nothing better to do than blast away at crows with shotguns. Longtime residents of the area say the roost has been there for decades but seems to be decreasing in size, presumedly because of the sport shooters. Since the environs of Baltimore are rapidly pushing in this direction, however, things may be looking up for these rural birds. Quite possibly there will soon be a nice shopping mall with security guards near the woods.

Our cities and suburbs are beautifully, if unintentionally, laid out for crows—open glades, good for foraging, mixed with nicely spaced trees, which provide protection and nest sites. On the ground below are windrows of paper, plastic and fabric remnants that are suitable for nest building. (Some crows' nests I have seen suggest that Styrofoam cup scraps are currently a fashionable construction material.) Richard Banks, an ornithologist with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in Washington, has become avocationally interested in this matter. He thinks that there may be more crows' nests in his neighborhood of Alexandria, Va., than are found in any other comparably sized area in the U.S.

The movement of crows from the country to the city is of major consequence to them, but the rural birds have also made some minor idiosyncratic adaptations. For example, certain English crows have taken to hanging around English ice fishermen. When the anglers go off to warm up, leaving the holes in the ice unguarded, the birds come down, haul up the lines, beak over claw, and take whatever bait or fish they find on the end of them.

There are some aggravating gaps in a report from Moscow published last summer, but according to the dispatch, authorities in Moscow decided back in the 1970s that there were too many pigeons in their city and, for reasons inexplicable to them, too few crows. In hopes that crows would destroy some of the pigeon eggs and nestlings—as they tend to do—some crows normally found in Siberia were brought to the more temperate Moscow region. As of 1987, Pravda reported, the Muscovites had a new and peculiar set of problems: "Since their introduction the crows have proliferated...and have taken to sliding down the gilded cupolas in the Kremlin's historic churches, inflicting serious damage on several of them." The account goes on to say that the crows also have begun "bombing the glass roof of the GUM department store in Red Square...." The ammunition? "Heavy stones," Pravda reported. "The store has tried replacing the glass covering with a specially reinforced transparent roof."

Not to mock Soviet science, but the activities of the Moscow crows reflect some of the normal interests of crows. There is a trout stream running through the property where I live, and crows who have shared the premises often occupy themselves by picking up stones and dropping them into the creek. Now, it is well known that crows will throw shellfish on rocks in order to break them open and get at the meat, but they plainly do not consider the pebbles ingestible items. Rather, it seems that they drop the pebbles for about the same reason we sometimes idly toss stones into the water—because it is entertaining. Perhaps the Moscow crows at first mistook the GUM roof for a pond, but unable to create splashes, they continued to drop stones on it because the bounces and thuds were amusing.

One time, outside a cabin in southeastern Alaska, I watched a raven repeatedly slide down the side of an ice-covered woodpile. A dozen times or so the bird spread its wings for balance, sat on what passes in a raven for its butt and careened to the ground, then picked itself up and did it again. For creatures of such tastes, the golden dome of an ancient church would be to a frozen woodpile more or less as Lake Placid is to a backyard sled run.

On the face of it, the relationship between crows and humans is very one-sided. We provide them with good food, residential areas and, apparently, recreational facilities. In return we sometimes kill them for sport and, less often, eat them. However, there is another aspect to the relationship, which tends to balance the equation. It is the nature of crows that they are among the best and easiest of wild animals for people to know and become attached to intimately. According to cuneiform notes left on clay tablets around 2500 B.C. and attributed to Gilgamesh, the legendary Mesopotamian leader, he had a companion raven. So did Eric the Red, the Viking explorer-hero. Legend has it that Eric and his men, rowing furiously, followed their bird across the North Atlantic to discover Greenland.

These ancients were probably not the first—and were certainly not the last—to live voluntarily with crows or ravens. Everyone I have known or heard about who has had such an experience with one of these birds seems to remember it vividly and consider it exceptionally gratifying. I, for one, have had—and been had by—crows for more than 50 years. There are a number of people and three dogs who have meant more to me than any of the crows, but I have liked all of the crows better than most dogs and some people.

Take, for example, the crow of this past summer. The bird was hatched in a box elder that stands about half a mile from the end of one of the runways of Washington's National Airport. He had apparently fallen from the nest a week or so before he could fly. An old friend of mine, a good one, was walking nearby and came upon this bird, and knowing that I was without crow, brought the bird to me in Pennsylvania.

Young crows are much easier to take care of than are most wildlife orphans. They do not cower or cringe but from the beginning are bold, noisy creatures with enormous appetites. This one arrived on a late May morning in a large cardboard carton. When the box was opened the bird immediately started squawking for food. Knowing he was coming, I had mixed up a batch of crow chow—hard-boiled eggs, canned dog food and oatmeal—which is as good as anything else for young birds and convenient to get into them. The way to feed a young crow is to put a gob of chow on a finger and shove it down the bird's more or less perpetually gaping gullet. The finger approximates the beak of a parent bird and triggers the swallowing reflex. While stuffing young birds in this fashion, my custom is to yell "Hello!" at them. If cackled a bit, this word has a crowish ring to it. In a day or two they recognize and respond to "Hello," which has therefore been the working name of most of the crows with whom I have lived.

Crow formula is easy to make, but young birds will ravenously consume—and thrive on—anything reasonably edible. A few weeks after Hello was up and about, the various people feeding him added up what they had given him in a two-hour period—seven fingers of basic crow mix, a dozen white grapes, two bits of peanut-butter sandwich, seven earthworms and parts of two crawfish fetched for him from the creek.

Another good thing about the management of crows: They do not need to be confined or restrained. I have known possessive people who, fearful of losing crows, have kept them throughout their lifetimes in cages or with clipped wings, which prevents them from flying. I consider this wrong for practical, rather than moral, reasons. The birds may adjust and make the best of their imprisonment or mutilation, but they are never fully crows. Therefore the people around them are not so fully rewarded and instructed as they might be.

During Hello's first few days with me and my family in Pennsylvania, an effort was made to keep him inside a workshop so that, while still flightless, he would not fall victim to a car or to dogs and cats, who were still learning about his protected status. In the shop he built up his strength by hopping and flapping around the room, picking up and throwing down nails, small screwdrivers and anything else he could lift. Although he would have had a less varied array of things to fiddle with in the wild, he would have been doing about the same had he been leading an ordinary crow's life.

The wing feathers of a young crow, which power flight, develop more rapidly than do those of the tail, which serves as a steering and braking device. Consequently, when the birds first leave the nest they can fly to nearby trees, but because of their still imperfect navigational equipment, they are not able or inclined to go very far. This is convenient for the parent birds, who continue to feed and instruct them for several weeks after the youngsters have left the nest. Birds in this stage of their development are aptly called branchers. (No systems, not even natural ones, are perfect. Young crows, by accident or because of overconfidence, regularly stray too far too fast, and end up—like Hello—on the ground, where they are vulnerable to predators.)

By the time he was six weeks old. Hello was an advanced brancher, active around the yard throughout the day. He was strong enough of wing to fly fairly well in a straight line or a bit upward, but still so short of tail as to be awkward and uneasy about landings. Because of his special circumstances, this created some problems. He would get himself into the upper branches of a 40-foot spruce, for example, then do what he would have done had he still been in the box elders near National Airport: open his mouth and squall pitifully, demanding that someone fly up with food. None of us did, of course, and driven by the desperate fear that starvation was imminent (a fear that grips young crows every hour or so), Hello would finally screw up his courage and attempt to come down to the shoulder or arm of a potential feeder. Sometimes he hit the mark, but just as often, because of his stubby tail, he did not. To avoid getting smacked in the face by a flailing crow and to keep him from crashing to the ground, it became the standard practice to stand alongside a clipped boxwood hedge when offering food to him. The bushes made a soft pad for his crash landings.

Though not generally fancy fliers, crows are very strong, enduring ones, as Hello became by midsummer. Even so, they are among the most terrestrial of birds, spending a great deal of time on the ground, where they do a lot of feeding, and where they are agile and seem much at ease. Even after he was a competent flier, Hello remained a willing and able walker. His home here was a 10-acre clearing on the side of an undeveloped, heavily wooded mountain. If Hello chose to follow somebody into the woods, he did so by flying from tree to tree, where the going was easier for him than on the brushy ground. In the clearing, however, he usually went on foot at a brisk waddle, which was good enough to keep pace with a person walking slowly. If the crow fell behind, he would take a few flaps to catch up or would land on a head or shoulder and ride along for a while. In part, this was a foraging tactic, a method for staying close to prime food sources, but some sociability may also have been involved. Among themselves, crows are habitually gregarious and we were, at the time. Hello's crows. Since we showed no inclination to join him in the air, he stayed with us on the ground.

I have a large German shepherd, Zenas, who seldom is more than a few paces away from me. Thus, Hello often walked with Zenas or—after they became well acquainted—rode on him. A crow and a hundred-pound dog strolling side by side are attention-getters; even more so is a dog walking along with an anxious expression on his face and a crow balanced between his ears. First thoughts tend to dwell on what an unnatural thing this is; second thoughts are quite the opposite. A crow riding on a dog's head, like the tip of an iceberg, only hints at the complex of natural elements upon which this uncommon relationship is based.

Zenas is a steady dog, a fine example of the kind of willing, servant-companion that 10,000 years or more of domestication has produced. One characteristic of a good dog is that he will put up with improbable fellow beasts—and even people—who he has been given to understand enjoy the protection of the human who has the dog's loyalty. Thus Zenas can be absolutely trusted with two house cats, though they sometimes tease and taunt him. There are also some barn cats around, working rodent hunters, who do not have household status or immunity, and the dog will chase and kill them as prey when he can. He tolerated the crow simply because it was another of my unfathomable idiosyncrasies. If I had somehow come by a companion bumblebee—an insect that Zenas especially despises—he would have probably done the same.

As for crows, they may become companionable, but this is a matter of individual adaptation, not genetic programming. Hello had come to accept us and, to an extent, Zenas, as odd crows (he had been imprinted, as behaviorists say). The dog, not being much good as a source of food, was considered an inferior but safe and sometimes entertaining crow in drag. Beyond using him as a mount, Hello pulled Zenas's tail and ears with his beak, fiddled with his collar and sometimes groomed him. (An English fancier of crows and dogs reports that when the three of them went walking, the crow, if permitted, would carry the spaniel's leash in its beak.)

Then there is the third party to this interspecies byplay, the person, who is the necessary catalyst. Though we have sometimes abused other creatures shamefully, for as long as there have been stories or reports of the human race, we have yearned to know what C.S. Lewis once called affectionately the "other bloods." The why of it is too large a question but the fact of it, our urge to have compassionate relationships with other animals, is as definitive a characteristic of our species as is our ability to do sums and build shopping centers. Crows are so bright and brassy that they often make you laugh and feel good. But they are also forever making you wonder—about them, about yourself and, if you keep at it, about the world in general.

After Hello began rounding up much of his own grub in the woods and fields and was no longer incessantly begging, he would sometimes fly down, sit alongside one of us and flatten out so that he could be gently rubbed. If someone obliged him and continued for 15 minutes or so, it induced in him what appeared to be a trancelike state—his eyes closed, his head lolled and his wings drooped. Among themselves, crows will often preen each other but so far as I know, nothing they can do approximates this sort of stroking. Yet there was something in the nature of Hello which enabled him to put this all together—that we had the proper hands and inclinations to produce a sensation he found agreeable.

When things were quiet, Hello would fly down to a convenient shoulder and make gurgling, clucking, even cooing sounds, which were quite different from the ones he used in conducting ordinary business. He kept at this longer and seemed more interested if the person responded by murmuring things like "Where have you been, Hello? That's a good crow. Say it again, Hello." Eventually, he began to experiment with, but never quite mastered, the magic sound of his own name. As noted, crows are mimics by nature. Even so, this voluntary, seemingly purposeful behavior is another wonder.

Crows are great baublists. They appear to covet and will certainly snatch and carry off bright, shiny objects, including, in my experience, spoons, spark plugs, coins, pencils, eyeglasses, rings and beads. Ethologists (students of animal behavior) say this apparent fondness for trinkets is simply an example of misguided foraging activity. Being omnivores, the argument goes, crows peck away at everything, testing for edibility. They also habitually create caches of excess food, as squirrels do with nuts. This theory is true and explanatory up to a point; but I happen to think it underestimates the learning ability of crows. All the crows I have known can clearly tell, after a few experiments, the difference between, say, a small pair of pliers and a crawfish. Yet they will go on messing with the inedible pliers.

Early on, Hello discovered that I always carry cigarettes in my shirt pocket. He thought much better of this habit than many people do these days. He would sit casually on my shoulder at first, as if he were there for some other purpose; then he would drive his beak into my pocket, spear a Kent III and fly off with it dangling from his beak. (Crows seldom carry objects in their talons.) As a defensive measure, I took to turning the cigarette package upside down. This worked until he became strong enough to grab and fly off with the whole pack, scattering Kents, which cost eight cents each, as he went. Then I began carrying the cigarettes in my pants, which somewhat curtailed the loss but taught him to pry into these pockets, where he was sometimes able to find and extract even better objects, on the order of car keys. While he still had his cigarette habit, though, he tried eating them, but soon found tobacco unappetizing. Thereafter, he simply played with them, tossing Kents in the air, catching them in his beak or talons, dropping them when he tired of the game. Perhaps, like a smoker, he was perpetually hopeful that the next cigarette would be tasty, but there is no evidence of that. What seems from observation more plausible (if anthropomorphic), is that the cigarettes and perhaps the act of getting them gave Hello satisfaction roughly related to that which we think of in ourselves as aesthetic.

One Sunday afternoon toward the end of July, when a good many people were coming and going, Hello did two bizarre but thought-provoking things that may or may not have been causally connected. Having frisked several visitors and been suitably admired, the crow lost interest in the party, which by then amounted to half a dozen people sitting around in lawn chairs talking. Hello flew off and was not seen for an hour or so. Later somebody who had gone for a walk came back and said we should look at the crow who was doing something weird in a patch of sand along a driveway. What he was doing was anting, which most crows occasionally do, but which Hello had not been seen doing before. Anting commences when a crow finds an anthill, squats down and wriggles around on it. Hello had apparently been at this for some time when we found him, for there were crawling, wounded and smashed ants all over his body.

Ants produce and will exude—when they are crushed, for example—formic acid, a pungent, acrid substance. One school of thought holds that crows roll in ants in order to smear themselves with this acid, which may act as a repellant to body parasites. Others speculate that the substance has a strong sensual, or even consciousness-altering, effect on the birds. Derek Goodwin, a leading British ornithologist and author of Crows of the World, the standard reference on the species, has written that when "anting at high intensity [crows] do so with great apparent concentration...and give the impression of being less alert than usual to other stimuli."

To put it another way, if a teenager showed up looking like Hello did as he ecstatically writhed in the hill of red ants next to the driveway, a parent would start delivering lectures about just saying no. (There is a natural historian named David Quammen, whom I know to be a fine essayist and who mutual acquaintances say is personally a good guy; I have never liked the man, however, because he has made a lot of clever, insightful comments about crows that I wish I had thought of first. About anting crows, Quammen has written in his book Natural Acts: "They revel in formication." He has also said—damn him!—that crows may be overqualified for their evolutionary station in life, and thus boredom accounts for some of their odd behavior.)

After using up the anthill, for all intents and purposes, Hello rejoined the social circle in the yard. However, he was so quiet and subdued that for a time no one paid any attention to what he commenced doing next—hopping around to drinking glasses, sipping the dregs of Fuzzy Navels, a refreshing orange juice and peach schnapps beverage popular in these parts. By the time he was noticed, the crow was wobbly and he'd had, as the expression goes, a snootful. Cut off from the sauce, the crow went unsteadily to the creek, splashed himself and drank a little pure water. Then he flew off and was not seen for the rest of the day. Nor did he appear in the morning, as had always been his custom. The unusual absence was a matter of concern and guilt because of our negligence in allowing a bird already stoned on ants to overindulge in Fuzzy Navels. But he showed up at about noon, apparently in good health and spirits.

The timing was probably coincidental, but soon after his fling Hello's routine began to change. During his first months he had always been close at hand during the day and had spent the nights in a spruce near the house. As the summer passed he began to disappear during the middle of the day, and the periods of absence expanded to the point where, by the middle of August, he was usually around the house for only a couple of hours each evening and morning. When he was with us he was social, chatty and affectionate, as always, but clearly our activities were no longer enough to hold his undivided attention. This pattern of behavior generally develops in free-ranging companion crows. Probably it is connected with a seasonal restlessness that affects all crows. As the summer wanes, the separate family groups merge and there is a shift of territory as the birds begin forming the large winter roosting flocks.

The breaking-away process is hard on those who know they are being left behind—like watching the last days of a youngster's childhood—but it tends to sharpen the appreciation of what remains of things as they once were. This was particularly true in the case of Hello, who began doing something that any crow can undoubtedly do but none I have known has done so memorably. After Hello began roaming, my wife and I got in the habit of drinking our morning coffee while sitting on a stone wall by the creek, calling him to join us. "Hello, Hello," we'd call to him, and at first he came in conventionally, banking through the trees. Then one morning we first saw (but could not immediately identify) him half a mile or so up in the air as a small black spot against the mountain. Maintaining his altitude, he swung directly overhead and then started down, turning tight spirals, making back flips and side slips, until he dropped lightly onto the wall beside us. Thereafter, about two mornings out of three until the last one, he made the same sort of dramatic entrance.

There was no practical need for these acrobatics or, for that matter, for him to join us in any fashion. Perhaps doing so was simply his pleasure. Certainly it was ours. The aerial display was in itself a marvelous thing, but there was something else. Having a crow—so much another blood—dive out of a high sky to sit down beside you creates a powerful feeling of connection, a sense that there can be and has been a natural mingling of naturally alien essences. Something of you is in the consciousness of a crow up in the air as something of him stays with you on the ground.

There are risks inherent in these relationships, not the least of which is the fear that they will end tragically. Various companion crows I have known, precisely because they were companions, have roosted in ill-chosen places and been eaten by raccoons; have been trapped in cars and smothered: have been so innocent as to make sitting targets for a mindless stranger with a .22. But as far as any of us knows, the end of Hello came about as it should have. He dropped down one morning and then went off with our son and granddaughter, who were taking a hike on the mountain. Hello stayed with them, flying from tree to tree, now and then riding on their shoulders until they returned to the house. He had a bite to eat and flew off again. None of us has seen him since.

For a few weeks after Hello left, I would shout "Hello!"—not so much hopefully but reflexively—at passing crows, none of which acknowledged me. As with a great summer vacation, though, the sense of loss, which is very strong immediately after a crow has gone, passes. What remains are memories and feelings of gratitude about what a fine time was had.

http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1068116/index.htm

(116) Birds react to human gaze

2009-05-01T13:51:00.003+02:00

[ Anyone who ever stared at crows from a distance will know, but now scientists have discovered this fact too... ]

A new study of jackdaws shows that these crow-like birds react to humans watching them, changing their behavior depending on who is looking and how the gaze moves.

"Jackdaws seem to recognize the eye's role in visual perception, or at the very least they are extremely sensitive to the way that human eyes are oriented," said Auguste von Bayern one of the study's authors from the University of Oxford.

The study, published in Current Biology, found that hand-reared jackdaws took significantly longer to retrieve food if a human was staring at the food than if the person was looking away. The bird would only react in this way if the person was a stranger and therefore potentially threatening.

The jackdaws were also able to interpret certain eye movements and hand gestures from the humans to find food that had been hidden, such as finger pointing or moving eyes. The jackdaws were unable to read communication that was static, however, such as an unmoving stare or a tilted head.

The discovery is particularly surprising since other intelligent species, like chimpanzees and dogs, have been found to be insensitive to staring or eye movement, according to von Bayern. Instead, these species appear to depend on other forms of communications, such as head or body orientation or movement. They do not appear to comprehend eyes as communicative organs.

"We may have underestimated the psychological realms of birds," von Bayern said. "Jackdaws, amongst many other birds, form pair bonds for life and need to closely coordinate and collaborate with their partner, which requires an efficient way of communicating and sensitivity to their partner's perspective."

The researchers hypothesis that jackdaws respond to human eyes, because unlike many species they use eyes to communicate with each other. Similar to human eyes, jackdaws' have a dark pupil surrounded by a white iris.

Jackdaws are corvids, the same genus as crows and ravens, and are one of the smallest birds in this genus. Highly sociable, they live in large hierarchal groups and are one of the only known species to have been observed giving and sharing food frequently.

http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0406-hance_jackdaws.html

(115) Crow Nuisance, Crow Delight

2008-09-05T21:21:00.000+02:00

Crow Nuisance, Crow Delight
By Joe Deegan, July 30, 2008

As children growing up in Riverside, my friends and I were captivated by crows, big birds that were bold. We used to see how close we could creep toward them, while they seemed to contemplate our attention before flying away. What were they cawing about us?

Not long ago, the following email message arrived in the Reader offices. “Originally, the only crows I had ever seen,” observed the writer, “were at Death Valley. Now, they are all over La Jolla, walking on my wooden roof with scratchy nails, standing in the treetops, doubtless robbing babies from nests of other birds, leaving huge poops down the side of my house and on the front sidewalk. How come they have moved in such numbers to the coast? We used to have mostly raucous mockingbirds, but now it’s crows. There must be a reason for this migration.”

There must be a reason all right, but local bird experts aren’t sure what it is.

One of them is Terry Hunefeld, who has just returned from leading a seabird-watching expedition past San Clemente Island, 110 miles into the Pacific. “There are birds far out on the ocean, such as albatrosses,” he says, “that people never even see from land. They sometimes fly for thousands of miles before coming down.”

In contrast, crows tend to be stay-at-home birds. But if the La Jolla emailer is correct, they must have once left their inland habitats, right? Yes, Hunefeld tells me, in the early to mid-1980s, many of them suddenly seemed to pick up stakes and move into urban and coastal San Diego. Why they did it then, but not earlier, nobody adequately explains.

Crows seemed rarely to venture farther west than places like Poway, Lakeside, and El Cajon. “Those areas, and especially oak and riparian woodlands, were their native habitat,” says Hunefeld, who is 56 and retired from the real estate–training business. (He has always liked to spend time outdoors and, about eight years ago, got a serious case of bird-watching fervor.) “And even though San Diego was becoming a metropolis for a long time, it’s a mystery to ornithologists why the crows waited to move into the city, why they didn’t do it in the 1960s or 1970s, for instance. And why did it happen so quickly in the 1980s and 1990s?”

Hunefeld is most familiar with crow populations of the coastal valleys of Oceanside. He has been the compiler for the Audubon Society’s Christmas bird counts there for the past several years. “In Oceanside, 20-plus years ago,” Hunefeld tells me, “the count would average several hundred crows. In the late 1990s, it was up to 1000, 1400 in 2006, and when we counted last December, it was 1900.”

For further information on crows, Hunefeld refers me to Philip Unitt’s San Diego County Bird Atlas. Unitt is the curator of the Department of Birds and Mammals at the San Diego Natural History Museum. According to the atlas, American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) “nest in the crowns of trees with dense foliage.” Originally, coast live oaks in foothill areas were their favorites, but now that crows have moved to town, they inhabit “palms, pines, Italian cypress, and especially eucalyptus. In groves of such trees, crows nest colonially.”

In winter, crows gather in large flocks and roosts. Despite their more recent urban lifestyle, the highest concentration of crow populations in San Diego County, according to the bird atlas, is still “at the east end of Lake Hodges.”

Susceptibility to West Nile virus has become a particular hazard to crows. The virus “appeared in New York City in 1999,” says the atlas, “and is spreading rapidly across North America; crows have already been decimated in parts of the eastern United States.”

Other corvids are rooks, jays, and common ravens (Corvus corax). It is easy to confuse ravens and crows. But ravens are much bigger birds than crows, says Terry Hunefeld, in length, weight, and wingspan. Ravens have a shorter beak that’s somewhat like a “Roman nose,” and their wings are pointed, unlike those of crows. Ravens have longer tails than the fan-shaped crow tail. When the cousins fight, the single great advantage crows have over ravens is greater maneuverability in the air.

Ravens have long been local residents. “After the house finch,” according to Unitt’s bird atlas, “the Common Raven is the most widespread breeding bird in San Diego County. It occurs in all habitats, from beaches to mountaintops to desert floor. The change in the raven is less dramatic than that of the…crow, but the raven too is on the increase, aided by man-made…food sources…road kill, and…nest sites like buildings, bridges, and power-line towers.” They nest, for instance, in the California Tower in Balboa Park.

Crows are more communal than ravens. It’s hard to tell the male crows from the females. Both, together with extended families, take care of their young in nests at common roosts, which may be home to hundreds of crows. Egg laying in the San Diego region occurs roughly from the second week in March to mid-May. The incubation period is 18 days, according to the bird atlas.

Many people think of crows as a great nuisance. “They definitely can be annoying,” says Hunefeld, “especially in the evening, when they are calling to let each other know where they are.”

No matter what other people think, Hunefeld seems to be as fascinated with crows as with other birds. He concedes that he goes out bird-watching every day for one unique chance — to spot exotic birds. “Birds from the East Coast sometimes fly in here,” he says. “They just make a wrong turn during their migrations. And every once in a while, we’ll see Asian birds that, like the birds on our Pacific Flyway, go to Alaska for the summer. Then they just go back down the wrong coast.”

But crows? “Due to their cooperative and social nature, they may be the smartest bird out there,” says Hunefeld. “Crows will call warnings to each other and, in small groups, will chase away competitors.” They fight them off for food but will stand watch while their own family members eat.

“Crows are scavengers and will eat just about anything,” says Hunefeld. “So they are predators on the eggs and young of other birds.” They inhabit residential neighborhoods because they get lots to eat from picnics in parks, french fries and pieces of doughnuts on the sidewalk, and half-eaten burritos thrown from car windows. They help clean up refuse.

In that respect, crows’ urban existence is similar to their lives in earlier times. Farmers used to hate crows for eating their grain and fruit. But the crows fed on destructive insects at the same time.

On a neighborhood walk, you can often come surprisingly close to crows pecking at something on the ground. If you move in a way they find threatening, of course, they’re gone. “But they also recognize friendly gestures,” says Hunefeld. “When I was a kid, we helped a crow in our classroom to recover from a broken wing. For the next two years, he kept coming back for handouts.”

A number of websites attest to great affection for crows. I attach the following reminiscence entitled “Ball Playing Crows” from crows.net, The Language and Culture of Crows.

Washington State, near Seattle. “Grocery store, strip mall roof. As I approached the covered breezeway I could see several crows, maybe 5 or 6, ‘jumping’ up and down on the roof.… A moment later a super-ball dropped off the roof and bounced into the busy parking lot; three crows quickly followed and chased the ball while it bounced. When the ball came to rest in a gutter one of the crows picked the ball up in her beak and ‘threw’ it. At that point the other crows all tried to catch it. Even when it rolled under cars they would pursue the ball and make it bounce.…

“After about 10 minutes the ‘owner’ of the ball took the ball back up to the roof where I could once again hear the bouncing and jumping. The super-ball was one of the 2” diameter ones; so it was really an effort for them to pick it up and then fly.”

And now I notice on crows.net a possible answer to why crows suddenly moved from the backcountry into the San Diego urban area. “I was driving by when I noticed hundreds of crows gathering.… They were landing on top of the fence and all the way down covering all the ‘terraces.’ They stood in place all the way to the sidewalk. After a few minutes the area was packed with crows. Two crows were standing in the bicycle path by the street next to the sidewalk. One of them made a sound and all the other crows became silent facing the ones in the bottom. Then the second began making sounds. After about three minutes, the second crow stopped making sounds and the first one made a sound and all the others began flying off.

“The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this was that they were in an amphitheater listening to a lecture. I was amazed that they all stayed quiet while the one in the bottom was ‘speaking’ and none flew away during all this time. I was also surprised at how instantly they grew quiet when the first crow made the first sounds and how quickly they left when ‘he’ made the second sound.”

(114) Crows in Japan....again, again, and again...

2008-08-27T17:52:00.001+02:00

New York Times

May 7, 2008
Kagoshima Journal

Japan Fights Crowds of Crows
By MARTIN FACKLER

KAGOSHIMA, Japan — Fanning out in small teams, the men in gray jumpsuits scour the streets and rooftops with binoculars, seeking to guard this city from a growing menace. They look for telltale signs: a torn garbage bag, a pile of twigs atop an electric pole or one of the black, winged culprits themselves.

“There’s one!” a shout goes up.

Sure enough, one of their quarry flies brazenly overhead: a crow, giving a loud, taunting caw as it passed.

This is the Crow Patrol of utility company Kyushu Electric Power, on the hunt for crows whose nests on electric poles have caused a string of blackouts in this city of a half-million on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu.

Blackouts are just one of the problems caused by an explosion in Japan’s population of crows, which have grown so numerous that they seem to compete with humans for space in this crowded nation. Communities are scrambling to find ways to relocate or reduce their crow populations, as ever larger flocks of loud, ominous birds have taken over parks and nature reserves, frightening away residents.

It is a scourge straight out of Hitchcock, and the crows here look and act the part. With wing spans up to a yard and intimidating black beaks and sharp claws, Japan’s crows are bigger, more aggressive and downright scarier than those usually seen in North America.

Attacks, though rare, do happen. Hungry crows have bloodied the faces of children while trying to steal candy from their hands. Crows have even carried away baby prairie dogs and ducklings from Tokyo zoos, city officials said.

While no one knows the precise number of crows in Japan, bird experts and government officials in cities across the nation say populations have increased enormously since the 1990s. Tokyo says the number of crows it has counted in large parks rose to 36,400 in 2001 from 7,000 in the late 1980s, prompting a trapping plan that cut the numbers to 18,200 last year. However, ornithologists say that the actual number in Tokyo is closer to 150,000 birds, and that some crows may have moved to different areas to avoid the traps.

Behind the rise, experts and officials say, has been the growing abundance of garbage, a product of Japan’s embrace of more wasteful Western lifestyles. This has created an orgy of eating for crows, which are scavengers. Some steps taken to reduce crows include putting garbage into yellow plastic bags, a color the birds supposedly cannot see through, and covering trash with fine-mesh netting, to prevent large beaks from reaching the goodies within.

Still, the crows have proven clever at foiling human efforts to control them. In Kagoshima, they are even trying to outsmart the Crow Patrol. The birds have begun building dummy nests as decoys to draw patrol members away from their real nests.

“They are trying to outfox us,” said Kazuhide Kyutoku, deputy chief of Kyushu Electric’s facilities safety group, which conducts the patrols. “They aren’t willing to give up territory to humans.”

The birds seem to be winning. Mr. Kyutoku said despite the twice-weekly patrols, which have removed 600 nests since they began three years ago, the number of nests keeps increasing, as have blackouts. The utility says there were three major cutoffs last year. The biggest was in March, when a strand of wire in a nest short-circuited power lines, briefly blacking out Kagoshima’s central port district. In another cutoff, some 610 homes and businesses lost power for 48 minutes when a crow stuck its beak into a high-voltage power line.

Crows have also shown a surprising ability to disrupt Japan’s super-modern technological infrastructure. In the last two years, utility companies in Tokyo reported almost 1,400 cases of crows cutting fiber optic cables, apparently to use as materials for nests. Blackouts have become common nationwide, including one last year in the northern prefecture of Akita that briefly shut down high-speed bullet train service.

“Japanese react to crows because we fear them,” said Michio Matsuda, a board member of the Wild Bird Society of Japan and author of books on crows. “We are not sure sometimes who is smarter, us or the crows.”

The crow explosion has created a moral quandary for Japan, a nation that prides itself on nonviolence and harmony with nature, because culling programs are the only truly effective method of population control.

Tokyo was one of the first to take lethal measures, under the lead of its strong-willed governor, Shintaro Ishihara. Mr. Ishihara angrily ordered the city into action after a crow buzzed his head while he was playing golf, city officials said.

In 2001, the city began setting traps in parks and nature reserves, using raw meat as a lure. In the following seven years, the city captured more than 93,000 crows, which it killed by sticking the meat in trash bags filled with poison gas. Tokyo says the number of crow-related complaints from residents have dropped as a result.

“In the old days, crows and humans could live together peacefully, but now the species are clashing,” said Naoki Satou, the chief of planning in Tokyo’s environmental department, which conducts crow countermeasures. “All we really want to do is go back to that golden age of co-existence.”

Other communities, like Tsuruoka, a city in the northwestern prefecture of Yamagata, have started following suit.

Tsuruoka installed traps last year after about 7,000 crows took over a central park and the playground of a nearby high school, said Soichiro Miura, chief of the city’s environmental measures division. He said students complained of crow droppings so thick they had to use umbrellas, and of birds flying into classrooms to steal box lunches.

While the city said it killed only 200 crows last year, the use of traps has stirred opposition. A local ornithologist, Michiyo Goto of Yamagata University, called for nonviolent alternatives, such as relocating the crows outside the city by building an appealing habitat for nesting, which she said was a brightly lighted area with no underbrush to hide predators.

“Once you start killing them, there’s no end,” Ms. Goto said. “You can’t stop the damage unless you exterminate every last crow.”

(113) Listening to Raven - The Shadow's Role as Guide

2008-06-19T20:42:00.005+02:00

[I originally wrote this essay back in 1996-97, while living in
Seattle. I revised it in 2002 after moving to Tucson and it was published that year at the CG Jung
Page. When it was accepted there, the site was free to anyone who wanted to read the articles. In the last few years, however, they have required
people to register -- and pay a fee -- to access the articles. So I am posting it here for free. It's long, but breaking it up into separate posts
didn't feel right for this piece.]

Listening to Raven:
The Shadow's Role as Guide

In the
beginning, Raven created the world and all the animals, plants, and people we know to exist. But there was only darkness. Raven had not created the sun and
the moon and the stars. There, in the darkness, lived a great chief and his daughter. In a cedar box, the young woman possessed the sun, the moon, and the
stars. Raven coveted these items, and he decided that he would become a hemlock needle in order to steal these treasures from the people. Having become a
needle, and falling into a glass of water the young woman was about to drink, he entered the daughter and became an infant in her womb. He was born into
their family and was greatly loved by both his mother and grandfather.

Raven wanted to play with the treasures in the beautiful
cedar boxes, and he would not stop crying until his grandfather allowed him to play with the boxes. Once he had them in his possession, Raven threw the
stars and moon up through the smoke hole, where they instantly scattered throughout the heavens. But he did not yet have the sun, and he continued crying,
making himself sick, until grandfather gave him the box containing the sun.

He played with the box for a very long time, then suddenly
returned to his form as Raven and flew, with the box, up through the smoke hole. Far away from the village, he found some people living in the darkness. He
asked if they would like to live in light, but they did not believe that Raven, as powerful as he was, could dispel the darkness. So he opened the cedar
box and released the sun into the sky, and the people were afraid, scattering throughout the world. (Adapted from Smelcer, 31-2)

* * * * *

The other morning, just after sunrise, as I sat outside my
apartment, drinking coffee and enjoying the infrequent sunlight in a Seattle winter, I watched two young crows, little brothers to the ravens, play
keep-away with a piece of colored paper. From tree to tree, telephone pole to telephone pole, rooftop to rooftop, one crow chased the other, trying to
steal the worthless piece of paper. This game continued for several minutes before I had to get ready for work, and the game surely continued in my
absence.

From time to time during the day I thought about those crows. I
remembered other times I had watched crows engaged in similar activities, such as hanging upside down from telephone wires, dropping stones and flying down
to catch them before they hit the ground, or playing "king of the mountain" on top of a telephone pole. I have always felt a connection to crows
and ravens, the shadowy birds, a bond that lives beneath waking awareness most times, but often surfaces in dreams or in poems. In the nine years I lived
in Seattle -- a city where crows may be more numerous than in any other American city -- I had many opportunities to observe the behavior of crows, to watch them mate, hunt, and, most of all, play.Â

Watching crows at play, I understand why
the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest portrayed the crow and raven as trickster figures in their myths. Crows love to play, and because of their
superior intelligence and relatively simple lifestyle, they have many hours of free time in which to pursue their love of games. In fact, they not only
play among themselves, but they have been known to play with members of other species, pecking at a sleeping dog's ears, pulling on the tail feathers
of other birds, amusing themselves at the expense of others.

David Quammen suggests, only slightly tongue in cheek, that crows
are bored, that they have outgrown their evolutionary niche. Another writer, Candace Savage, has documented example after example demonstrating that crows
and ravens, already considered the most intelligent birds, may also be more intelligent than many of the highly regarded mammals such as cats and monkeys.
With all this brain power, their love of play, their tightly knit family groupings, their preference for life-long mate pairing, and a rather complex
ability to communicate with sound, crows are intriguing creatures. It is no wonder that in regions where crows and ravens are common, the indigenous
peoples often placed these birds in the role of creator, although like coyote in the Southwest, a creator with a sometimes troubling sense of
humor.

* * * * *

As shown in the Tlingit myth at the beginning of this discussion
(variations of this myth are common among other tribes in Alaska and northern British Columbia), crows and ravens are often associated with darkness, most
obviously due to their black feathers. In many traditional myths, from both this continent and Europe, Crow is a bringer of knowledge. The Norse God Odin
has two ravens, Hugin and Munin, representing thought and memory, who each day fly over the earth and return at sunset with news of what they have seen. In
one of the Greek myths, Apollo turns Raven (who serves Apollo as Hugin and Munin serve Odin and was originally white), to black after Raven returns with
news that Apollo's beloved was cheating on him. There are two themes in this myth. The first, and most important, reveals the raven as a messenger, as
a creature capable of revealing what is unseen; the secondary theme is a variation on the clichÃ© of killing the messenger. No matter how raven/crow became
black, though, the reality is that we now associate these birds with darkness, as messengers of knowledge brought back from the unknown, often with a sense
of foreboding or evil (remember Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven").

Because the crow and raven are black, and because birds are often
associated with soul or spirit in mythology, I like to think of Raven (using the capital to denote the archetypal raven) as symbolic of the human shadow.
More precisely, Raven represents the role of the personal shadow as a wisdom figure. To my knowledge, there has been little or nothing written about the
role the shadow can play as a wisdom figure. In the Tarot, the Hermit, a shadowy personage living apart from other humans on his mountain and carrying a
lantern, is associated with wisdom gained through isolation. This card speaks to the isolation one must court in order to meet one's shadow. Just as
the Hermit offers light in the darkness, so, too, the shadow can bring light to those hidden regions of the human psyche, if only we can confront and
befriend that aspect of ourselves.

Approaching the issue from another perspective, that of Alchemy,
the raven can be seen as an exterior manifestation of the alchemical nigredo, the dark, base material from which the major opus begins (see
Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis). Jung's Psychology and Alchemy contains an illustration (230) that depicts the raven as a nigredo
symbol, and throughout this volume as well as the other alchemical works of Jung, similar images equate crow or raven with dark aspects of the psyche. Just
as the integration of shadow elements into consciousness is the first step toward individuation, working with the nigredo is the first step in the
psycho-spiritual transformation of physical lead into spiritual gold. In my own experience, and from various mythologies, Raven is an archetypal figure
associated with that process of transformation.

Whether one is working with the Western Gnostic/alchemical
tradition, or with the mythologies of various peoples from around the world, Crow and Raven are consistently associated with the dark aspect of the psyche,
the shadow. As Jolande Jacobi points out, all things unconscious, including shadow elements, are often projected onto objects or persons in the outer
world, or into the liminal space of dreams. The entire shadow may be embodied in the figure of a crow or raven in dreams, or in a coworker whose every word
or action is annoying. But sometimes, the shadow can contain a figure who is benevolent, a kind of guide who helps one face the shadow, and in doing so,
take away its ability to act autonomously.

* * * * *

Several years ago, during a period in which I had fallen in love
with a young woman, I began to have dreams with Raven as a central figure, always watching, often silent. These haunting dreams persisted over a span of
several months and frequently seemed more real than my waking life. In nearly every variation of the dream, I was empty at an interior level, searching for
meaning, for connection, for some understanding of my isolation. Raven was always nearby, a presence that produced in my dream-self a sense of anger, of
being judged. Even in waking life, I had a vague awareness that something ominous and/or portentous was beginning.

As the months progressed, my relationship with the young woman
deteriorated. The dreams continued, accompanied by a creative burst of new poems in which Raven assumed the same role as in the dreams. Also during this
period, I launched myself into a serious exploration of the writings of Carl Jung as part of some research I was doing on the poet William Everson. I had
encountered Jung's ideas a couple of years earlier, as a psychology student and in an art history class, but the academic atmosphere in my college did
not admit any influence from Jungian psychology -- B. F. Skinner and Carl Rogers reigned supreme. So now, as an English major, but still with a driving
need to understand the psychological processes that can create brilliant poetry and fiction, I immersed myself in Jung's writings, first and foremost
looking into his conceptions of the structures of the psyche. Upon reading about the shadow, I immediately knew there was more to those dreams than I had
previously understood, but, as yet, I couldn't put the pieces together.

*
* * * *

The most common understanding of the shadow maintains that this
aspect of the unconscious Self contains all the dark and unacceptable traits we have repressed because they are unpleasant. But this is only partly true.
The shadow, specifically the personal shadow, contains all aspects of Self that have been repressed or not admitted to consciousness. This
includes positive traits, aspects of ourselves--such as creativity in men or assertiveness in women--that are not socially accepted, as well as the more
commonly labeled negative traits.

For most of us, the shadow aspect of our consciousness remains
unknown, unconscious. As mentioned above, everything that is unconscious is projected onto some object outside of the ego. By projection, I am referring to
an automatic, unconscious process in which something that is unconscious in the psyche is attributed to an object (a person, image, or figure of dreams) as
though it belongs to that object. From this definition, the shadow becomes a fertile darkness we need to admit to consciousness in order to prevent it from
distorting the way we view the world. But if we allow that the shadow also contains positive traits or aspects of our psyches of which we are not
conscious, it then becomes a possible light that can help us lead a more fulfilling life.

To be more specific, I believe that we each contain a type of
Guide figure, a psycho-spiritual complex focused around an archetypal aspect of Self that, if recognized, can serve to guide us through difficult periods
of the individuation process. This Guide image has been incorporated into the Tarot deck as the 14^th trump of the Major Arcana, known as
Temperance (Waite), Art (Crowley), or the Guide (Old Path). The 14^th trump plays an important role in the Fool's progress through the Major
Arcana: the card is associated with purging, right action, testing one's self, and the proverbial trial by fire (Alli, 191). The idea that these
challenges are functions of the Guide is intriguing, and suggests that the best away to deal with a crisis or trauma is not to avoid it, but to face it and
go through it.

In most people, this archetypal Guide aspect of Self remains
fully unconscious or is relegated to the shadow. But, like all shadow elements, it can and will become present when the archetypal energy in the psyche
reaches a critical mass. When a complex -- "an emotionally toned group of representations" in the psyche
that originates in the unconscious, and centers around an archetypal element (Jacobi 7) -- acquires so many
associations that it can longer remain submerged, it can displace the persona as the ego's interface with the world. (The classic example is the young
man with a "mother complex" who only chooses as partners women who will act in the role of mother for him. The complex has assumed control of his
actions, and until he can name it and make its sources conscious he will not be able to choose a woman based on any other criteria.) The important thing to
recognize, however, is that complexes are "intrapsychic," and as such, have at their core an archetypal element.

If there is buildup of psychic energy, and one is unable, or
unwilling, to actively admit the presence of the Guide archetype into conscious awareness, it may manifest as a projection out in the world or in our
dreams. The archetype may show up in the form of a mentor who happens along when one is in the depth of a crisis, or, in my case, as a raven who appeared
repeatedly in my dreams. In the latter case, not only is the Guide making its presence felt, it is doing so with the full impact of the shadow. The Guide,
in my dreams, was both sourced in and a symbol of the shadow, and it demanded that I acknowledge and integrate my shadow into
consciousness.

Years later I finally made the connection between my Raven
dreams, with the corresponding poems, and the shadow's capacity to act as Guide, to reveal "right action" by activating unconscious elements
that seek admission to consciousness. I believe there often exists in the individual a complex of emotional and/or archetypal energies that can come to
awareness through a connection with objects or events in the physical world, a notion Jung termed synchronicity. In the world of poetry, T. S.
Eliot suggested the term objective correlative to designate a pattern of objects, events, or actions that can awaken in the reader an emotional
response without the author having to state the connection directly. When I was first exposed to Eliot's idea, I liked the psychological quality of it,
which seems absent in most approaches to literary theory. As I have used the term in literary criticism, an objective correlative is composed of events or
objects in the physical, external world that become associated with a complex in the unconscious (archetype/shadow) to produce some form of psychological
awakening. Since then, I have become much more familiar with the concept of synchronicity and have adopted that term for the idea I originally acquired
from Eliot. As Jung pointed out with his story of the golden scarab, recognizing an association is often enough to begin the process of healing a
previously unconscious wound.

In an older version of the Tarot deck, the Marseilles Deck,
Temperance is depicted as a blue-haired angel wearing a red flower on her forehead and pouring liquid from a blue vase into a red vase. A simple reading of
the card would suggest that the blue vase is spirit and the red represents flesh, with the white liquid perhaps symbolic of the energy created when these
two aspects are mixed. The combining of two liquids can also be read as the union of any pair of opposites, male/female, light/dark, fire/water,
conscious/unconscious, and so on. The figure of the angel, however, is a bit more difficult to read, especially considering the proliferation of, and
specious interest in, angels over the last fifteen or so years. Sallie Nichols, in Jung and Tarot, offers this interpretation:

Angels have
long been seen as winged messengers from heaven, meaning psychologically that they represent inner experiences of a numinous nature which connect man
with the archetypal world of the unconscious. These winged visions appear in our mundane lives at crucial moments, suddenly bringing new insights and
revealing new dimensions of experience. (250)

The images of this deck most likely date from Renaissance France,
so it is understandable that the 14^th trump would be depicted as an angel. Modern versions of the Tarot have updated the Christian imagery to be
more universal in its application, including the Tarot of the Old Path, which names the 14^th card The Guide and depicts a figure who is largely
androgynous.

The importance of this card remains, however, its correlation to
an archetype in the unconscious mind. Jung, in Alchemical Studies, defines angels as "personified transmitters of unconscious contents that
are seeking expression" (82). He goes on to explain the consequences of not listening to the voice of this interior guide:

But if the conscious mind is not ready to assimilate these
contents, their energy flows off into the affective and instinctual sphere. This produces outbursts of affect, irritation, bad moods, and sexual
excitement, as a result of which consciousness gets thoroughly disoriented. (82)

Essentially, this defines the Guide's relegation to shadow
and the resulting projection of the turmoil created when unconscious elements of the psyche seek expression but are thwarted. Most of us have suffered
through periods like this in our lives, as I have in the dreams described above.

There is one more connection between the shadow, the angel/guide,
and the crow/raven. In discussing an alchemical work by Senior (De chemia), Jung suggested that ravens "represent the helpful spirits or
familiars who complete the work when the skill of the artifex has failed him. They are not, as in Faust, beautiful angels but dark messengers of
heaven, who at this point themselves become white" (Mysterium Coniunctionis 77). The artifex is the alchemist attempting to bring together
opposites (black/white, male/female, animus/anima, and so on) as part of the major opus. When the alchemist reaches the limits of conscious/ego ability,
the unconscious sends forth a dark, angelic guide, the Raven, to aid in the completion of the task, to bring the needed material from the unconscious mind.
The raven is a projection of the shadow, as Jung has identified the bird in other places (Psychology and Alchemy 134, Alchemical Studies
198). Having achieved the task of completing the work of the artifex, acting as the shadow to bring the necessary elements into consciousness, the raven is
purified and becomes white.

So, crow/raven is identified with the shadow and also is
identified with the archetypal Guide figure in the psyche. As we have seen, the shadow often contains this archetypal figure, which, if not integrated into
consciousness, can project itself into our dreams or out onto the world. The task of the Guide is to draw attention to those aspects of the unconscious
that are hidden and are seeking admission to consciousness, and through confrontation with the shadow, to bring the psyche one step closer to
wholeness.

* * * * *

I'd like to refer to the Tarot, once again, to understand the
role of the Guide in the "individuation process," Jung's phrase for the process of accessing and integrating unconscious elements of the
psyche into consciousness. The Temperance card follows the Hanged Man (12), whose role is surrender to processes working in the psyche, and then Death
(13), which signifies the falling away of old forms, the death of ego. With Temperance following these two crucial phases, the stage is set to begin the
third and final process of the Tarot Path: entry into the realm of Self-Realization. The Guide makes itself felt only when the energies of the psyche have
reached the point when its presence is necessary.

As the individuation process occurs in each person, there can be
moments of crisis when a complex of the unconscious mind breaks into awareness. According to Jung, "complexes always contain something like a
conflict-they are either the cause or the effect of a conflict" (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 79). Unless the presence of the complex is
so disruptive as to require intervention, the assumption is that its breakthrough into awareness signals the psyche's readiness to resolve that
conflict. The integration of a complex into consciousness, with the corresponding dissipation of its conflict, destabilizes the ego for a time. This
destabilization of the ego is sometimes experienced as a kind of death. With the transformative energies released in the dying of the ego, the Guide serves
as that aspect of the psyche that can lead one toward the final stages of growth. Once the Guide presents itself, it will always help the Hero along the
journey (Nichols 253).

Once we recognize the presence of the Guide --
whether as an angel, a crow, or a mentor figure -- and become familiar with its
energy, we can then access its wisdom through active imagination, Jung's method of engaging the archetypal figures in the psyche. There are a variety
of approaches to this project, mine being the creative process out of which poetry emerges. For me, the act of engaging language and allowing it to carry
psychic content to the page is a form of direct access to archetypal energy. Another valuable approach is through the generation of myth, either personal
or transcendent. Through writing a personal mythology, one is able to contextualize events and actions, and give them a place within a narrative structure,
thereby providing meaning to what otherwise may have seemed meaningless.

Essentially, you become a character in a story, and the plot of
the story is your life. Significant events can be written with all the detail and omniscient view that an author has when writing a novel. By writing about
a traumatic or ecstatic event, you can establish its importance in the plot of the life story, and possibly access previously unconscious awareness of the
event. The essential element, in order for mythology to be effective, is that it be believed, that it hold a central role in the understanding of one's
life.

The myth with which I began this discussion explained several
things for the Tlingit, not least of which was how the sun, moon, and stars were placed in the heavens. Remembering back to the end of the myth when the
people, frightened by the sun, scattered throughout the world, it also explained the existence of peoples all over the world that recognize Raven as
creator.

If we look at this myth at a universal level, Raven, as both
shadow and Guide figures, brings light to dispel the darkness. At the most basic level, we may see darkness as symbolic of the unconscious mind, the
unknown, and light as symbolic of consciousness, the known. Of course, Raven uses trickery to conjure this magic, but the Guide, coming as it so often does
from the shadow, is not always a purely benevolent figure; it also manifests, as we have seen, as the Dark Angel. In fact, the projection of the archetypal
Guide is sometimes meant to confront the psyche with its own shadow, as the Raven dreams did for me. In Greek mythology, it was Hermes (the Roman Mercury)
who performed this Trickster role, both as guide between this world and the underworld, and as Patron of Thieves. Hermes is nearly always depicted as
winged, thus furthering in Western myth the association of bird imagery with the ability to bridge the worlds of known and unknown. If the bird appears as
crow or raven, so much the better -- we then know we are engaged in the process of bringing the shadow to consciousness.

In the Bible, when the rains stop and Noah wishes to find dry
land, he sends a raven to bring back a sign, but the raven does not return until later, when all the waters have receded. So Noah then sends a dove, which
at first returns unable to find land; sent out again seven days later, it returns with an olive twig (Genesis, 8.6-10). Putting aside the fact that it was
Raven who found dry land in the Babylonian Flood myth, and that Judaism had to differentiate itself from that tradition by having a dove find dry land, it
is clear crows and ravens are not always to be trusted. Ignoring for now the clichÃ© of black (raven) as bad and white (dove) as good, this parable reveals
raven as a survivor and also as a creature not apt to do what it is told. Just as Hermes is Patron of Thieves, crows and ravens are notorious for their
ability and, seemingly, joy in stealing things and hiding them, or using them in a game of keep-away, as I mentioned earlier.

In the myth that began this discussion, Raven uses trickery first
to become human, then to steal the prized boxes. Raven transforms himself into a hemlock needle to enter the womb of the young woman and be born as a human
child. This highlights another talent of Raven and Crow -- shapeshifting. Much like Coyote of the Southwest, Crow and Raven are capable of transforming
themselves into other creatures and things when it suits their purposes. And like Coyote, the results aren't always what were intended. In this case,
however, Raven gets what he wants -- he steals the three boxes and releases the sun, moon, and stars into the
heavens.

When elements in the shadow become so charged with energy that
they make their presence felt in one's life, there is also an element of trickery involved. Unless one actively seeks out the lessons, shadow material
often presents itself as projections into the world. A person will act in such a way that irritates me until I feel anger or frustration. Many times, when
this occurs, it would be prudent to pause for a moment and see if there is anything in the particular behavior that is relevant to my own issues. I might
discover that the behavior that is crazy-making to experience is something I also do, but don't like about myself or that is not conscious. The shadow
has just used trickery to bring awareness to an element of the self that needs attention but is not yet conscious. In this way, the shadow acts as a guide
to awareness.

* * * * *

In my own life, Raven appeared at a crucial transition point. The
unique combination of my first spiritual love relationship and its subsequent deterioration, the burst of creative output that marked my first major phase
as a maturing poet, and the luminous dreams all signaled that time in my life as a critical period of transformation. Essentially, I experienced the trauma
of moving from childhood to adulthood. That period also marked the end of a false self I had adopted after the death of my father, when I was thirteen
years old, and the emergence a truer sense of Self. Because I did not have the father who might typically play the role of Guide for a young man entering
adulthood, my psyche had to devise its own solution to the problem. The presence of Raven in my dreams and poems revealed to me the emptiness of that false
self, confronting me with my shadow in a variety of ways until it worked its way into awareness. It also helped to point me in the direction of seeking out
a more authentic identity.

Since that period in my life, nearly seven years ago, Raven has
often appeared in my dreams, and he still frequently haunts my poems. Over time, though, the tone of Raven's presence has shifted from malevolence to
benevolent compassion. Even in my daily life in the world, I always try to acknowledge the presence of crows and ravens around me as a way to honor the
presence of the archetypal Raven who inhabits my psyche.

Works
Referenced

Alli, Antero. Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman's
Guide to Reality Selection. Santa Monica, CA: New Falcon Publications, 1994.

Conger, John P. Jung & Reich: The Body as Shadow.
Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1988.

Jacobi, Jolande. Complex / Archetype / Symbol in the Psychology
of C.G. Jung. Trans.

Ralph Manheim. Bollingen Series LVII. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
UP, 1959.

Jung, Carl Gustav. Alchemical Studies. Trans. R.F.C.
Hull. Volume 13,

Collected Works. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
UP, 1967.

-----. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Trans.
R.F.C. Hull. Volume 9, Part 1,

Collected Works. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
UP, 1959.

-----. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Trans. W.S. Dell
& Cary F. Baynes. New York,

NY: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1933.

-----. Mysterium Coniuntionis. Trans. R.F.C. Hull.
Volume 14, Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1970.

-----. Psychology and Alchemy. Trans. R.F.C. Hull.
Volume 12, Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1968.

Nichols, Sallie. Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey.
York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1980.

Quammen, David. Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and
Nature. NY, NY: Avon Books, 1985.

Savage, Candace. Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows,
Ravens, Magpies, and Jays. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1995.

Smelcer, John E. The Raven and the Totem: Traditional Alaska
Native Myths and Tales.

Anchorage, AK: Salmon Run Books, 1992.

~ William Harryman

(112) My great-grandfather the crow killer

2008-04-26T16:52:00.001+02:00

The one time I met my great-grandfather was unexpectedly, at the Grand Canyon. It was on an overcast March day when I was 18. I wasn’t looking for any relatives. I was just trying to take photographs. I’d never visited the national park, and so my grandfather, Frederick, had driven my 11-year-old brother and me from his home in Phoenix to see the South Rim.
Throughout his life, my great-grandfather — Frederick’s father — was a dedicated and passionate crow hater. Their early morning cacophony, disregard for other feathered creatures, and propensity for making off with shiny objects, spurred his absolute hatred. His early morning hunting expeditions around his farm in Milwaukee, Wis., were legendary.
My great-grandfather would rise with the birds’ first cawing, quietly dress in the shadows of his bedroom, and creep outside. Armed with a single-barreled shotgun, he would stalk the crows, occasionally seeking cover behind the duck blinds he’d erected from discarded Christmas trees. There, he would wait for the opportunity to fill the unsuspecting scavengers with saltpeter.
Other times, he wasn’t so patient: He’d get out of bed, load his gun, and, still in his striped nightshirt, inch the barrel past the second-story balcony. Once, my grandmother was jolted awake at 4 a.m. by the report of a shotgun, followed by two more "terrible explosions" from upstairs. She woke her husband and asked him what was going on. "It’s my father. He’s shooting crows," my grandfather said groggily, and went back to sleep.
Sometimes the crows outsmarted my great-grandfather. "They knew which way he came from," my grandmother told me, and so they roosted in different trees each night. They might have even recognized his face, as some believe crows can. "One time he said to me, ‘You know, Lois, those sons of bitches are quite smart.’ "
My great-grandfather had his own tricks, however. He managed to kill a fair number of crows each summer, and kept a tally with pencil marks on the walls of his garage. After a good day’s kill, he strung the black bodies together and hung them by their legs from the lowest branch of a nearby birch tree, in hopes of attracting more of their kind. One murder led to another.
Frederick was the first to notice the old bird standing on a railing overlooking the Grand Canyon. It was a raven, actually, but he thought the bird’s fine ebony plumage was of the sort that would have suited his father. He stared at the bird for a moment, then casually introduced us, telling my brother and me that his father, dead for 20 years, had arrived for a visit.
Seeing it was our first time at the ancient hole and we’d never met this feathered member of our family, my brother and I did not feel it was our place to ask any questions. We watched the high desert bird for a few minutes and snapped photographs, as Frederick explained: In the years after my great-grandfather died, my family joked that karma would bring him back as a crow. Thus, a myth was born.
There my great-grandfather was, seemingly pleased with his latest incarnation. The human characteristics and crow qualities had blended. I doubt my great-grandfather ever understood the crows he loathed, never went beyond the fact that the birds’ "talking" interrupted his sleep. But he had more in common with them than he probably would have admitted.
A family man and a social person, my great-grandfather made sausage for a living. He learned the recipes from his father, who was born in Frankfurt, Germany. From bloodwurst and headcheese to wieners and bacon, the second-generation wurstmacher helped turn his father’s butcher shop into what has become a 125-year success. He and his wife in turn had one child, my grandfather, to whom he taught the family business, along with the wonder of travel, the importance of family, the need to be in the company of others, and how to be compassionate.
As a crow, he fit in nicely, just like his human self: sociable, protective of his own kind, family-oriented, albeit stigmatized by history and legend. Corvids — members of the family of birds that includes crows, ravens and jays — are believed to mate for life, share common roosts and eat just about anything. Family members stay together, as the older siblings stick around to help raise the next brood. And as my great-grandfather duly noted, crows are crafty. In fact, they’re considered some of the smartest of all birds. Crows can make and use simple tools. They’ve even been seen placing nuts in front of moving automobiles to get at the meat after the tires crush the nuts.
My great-grandfather watched us from his guardrail perch and comported himself admirably. I guess the old fellow did not have much to complain about that day. He did not ask why I was taking pictures of the fog, or whether we still killed crows for pleasure and hung them from trees. And we didn’t think to ask him about anting — the crow practice of collecting ants under the feathers to control parasites — or about how he cached his food, or why crow alarm calls come in threes.
His eyes, now little black bulbs, no longer the dark brown of his human life, wandered with ours. Finally, the bird motioned good-bye with a flap of his wings and flew away, leaving us with an image as memorable as the giant red walls of the Grand Canyon — another picture for the family photo album.

Andrew Becker.

(111) Toads fall victim to crows in NT

2008-03-22T17:18:00.004+02:00

Toads fall victim to crows in NT

By Katrina Bolton
ABC News, Sep 15, 2007

Cane toads have been doing pretty well in some of the Northern Territory's remote areas, but at a tiny outstation about 500 kilometres east of Darwin, people have started to see them falling out of the sky.

John Greatorex has been visiting the Mapura outstation for years, but has only recently discovered that the cane toads have found themselves a predator.
He says he was quietly have a cup of tea last week when things became a little strange.

"We were sitting down just having breakfast by the fire and there was this 'plok' just beside us," he said.

"I looked down and it was a cane toad and I thought, 'hey, how come a cane toad's falling out of a tree?' I thought 'no, it couldn't be', and I looked up and saw a crow."

Mr Greatorex says a few minutes later, it happened again.
"Plok! Another one landed and I looked up and there was another crow up there," he said.

"It flew down and picked up the cane toad and off it flew too, up into the tree and it grabbed the cane toad and turned it over up on the bough of this tree and started eating its insides."

Queensland crows have been reported eating cane toads, but there has been less evidence of it in the NT.

Mr Greatorex says he was not entirely convinced, so he went out that night, caught a toad and released it when the crows were around the next day.

"One of them turned its head and it walked over to this cane toad and grabbed it by its leg and turned it over," he said.

"After it had got good hold of the leg off it flew up into a tree and started eating it."

Roslyn Malnumba spends most of her days weaving baskets at Mapuru, and has also seen the crows eating toads.

She says she is thrilled about the discovery.

"I'm happy, because the cane toads [are] hopping in our places. I don't like those cane toads," she said.

At Alice Springs Desert Park, native bird trainer Gareth Cat says once a group of crows have learnt how to eat the toads, the knowledge should spread.

"Crows show remarkable cognitive abilities, a lot of research believes them to have higher cognitive abilities than a lot of apes," he said.

"They can think about what they're doing and even in certain cases show imagination, which is a pretty hard thing to try to comprehend."

(see also post 87, "The Death Pool")

(110) Learning Teamwork From the Crows

2007-11-04T20:50:00.000+02:00

Friday, June 03, 2005

Learning Teamwork From the Crows

Now most of us know that crows are highly intelligent birds. Yes, I am talking of that ubiquitous black bird that you see on those cables crisscrossing the sky.
If you pull out an entry from an encyclopedia like the Wikipedia, it'll inform you that crows:
"As a group they show remarkable examples of intelligence; it would not be at all an exaggeration to characterize crows as being to birds what higher primates (including humans) are to mammals."
Some crows are known to " to manufacture and use its own tools in the day-to-day finding of food."

Today I saw that these dudes also exhibit teamwork to a degree that would shame us who are used to work, (in office lingo) in "cross-functional teams" to ensure "quality deliverables."

I was commuting from Ghatkopar to Andheri, via the Andheri-Ghatkopar road. The road was choked with vehicles as usual and my rickshaw was stuck in this spot near Asalpha for some minutes. Just a few yards away from my where my rickshaw had halted, there was these group of crows who were trying to breakfast at a much flattened, though obviously fresh, roadkill. Now all these crows were trying to do was enjoy their rodent in peace and get on with the day but the heavy traffic kept interrupting their repast. Not to mention, the traffic also kept "re-flattening" the few bits and pieces that these crows had managed to peck loose. And after a few such interruptions you could make out that the crows had had enough. "Something needs to be done!" was the crow going round the breakfast table.

So what did these guys do? What they actually did called for some nifty coordination and timing. The crows waited till there was a lull in the traffic. Then three swooped down in perfect formation, flying wing-tip to wing-tip, and landed at three coordinates around the roadkill. Then each got a good grip on the flattened rodent in his (or her) beak. Two pulled, the third appeared to simultaneously lift the breakfast up and they got it clean off the road. Then they just nodded to each other (like well-trained commandos no caws were exchanged) and took off simultaneously, carrying their food with them. A short flight and the three landed on the roof of a shop nearby to the rousing cheers from others of their kind. Then they got down to it.

And the traffic, after seeing this marvelous bit of teamwork, flowed smoothly to the next jam.

Mandar Talvekar

(109) Blue jays; planning ahead

2007-05-27T03:15:00.000+02:00

We have two dogs in our house, a golden retriever named Dusty and an Australian
shepherd-lab mix named Smoke. Dusty is clever enough in her way, but Smoke could
do algebra if she only had an opposable thumb to hold the pencil.

Smoke has an infallible internal clock that alerts her to dinnertime. At 5 p.m.
she goes to her food bowl, puts one paw on the rim and upends it, clattering it
across the kitchen floor in an action that says, "It's time to eat," as clearly
as if she had spoken it.

However, Smoke won't actually eat her food unless Dusty gets her dinner, too. If
for some reason Dusty's food hasn't been delivered, Smoke will wait by her full
dish and announce by spinning the empty dish repeatedly that the dinner ritual
is not complete.

People are always claiming marvelous feats for their dogs, so I'm offering
Smoke's touching concern for her fellow canid as an anecdote, not as evidence
she is a budding doggy altruist. Still, it is curious to note Smoke is willing
to delay her immediate satisfaction on behalf of fellow, unrelated being. Lest
you think she's completely noble, let it also be said she is a picky eater.

We also have a pair of blue jays that visit our backyard feeders. Blue jays are
notoriously bad-tempered and aggressive birds that fiercely defend a large
territory against conspecifics.

As Mark Twain related, from Jim Baker in "Baker's Blue Jay Yarn," "A jay hasn't
got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a
jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go
back on his solemnest promise."

Within such a context, blue jays seem unlikely candidates for demonstrating
altruistic behavior. But a recent experiment by David Stephens and colleagues at
the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis has cleverly demonstrated blue jays
can plan ahead and cooperate to benefit themselves and unrelated individuals.

There are plenty of stories of animal cooperation in the wild. Lions and wolves
hunt in groups, for instance. Pods of killer whales will herd fish and marine
mammals cooperatively. Vampire bats sometimes will share a blood meal with an
unrelated fellow bat if the latter has had an unsuccessful night out on the
neck. The bats do this on a tit-for-tat basis -- that is, they only share with
individual bats they are pretty sure will return the favor when they find
themselves in similar straits.

There are even examples of cooperation between species. In "The Parrot's
Lament," Eugene Linden relates an eyewitness account of cooperative fishing
between dolphins and humans in southern Brazil:
"The fishermen will line up in the shallow, murky waters in a bay near the town
of Laguna. Up to ten dolphins will station themselves twenty feet or so farther
out to sea. When the dolphins spot a school of mullet, they will dive and turn
underwater and then reappear on the surface, swimming towards the fishermen.
Just before they get within range of the nets, the dolphins will abruptly stop
and create a surging surface wave that carries the mullet the last few feet
towards the now braced fishermen, who cast their nets and haul in the panicked
fish."

Stephens, an associate professor of ecology, evolution and behavior at
Minnesota, told United Press International cooperation in cases where everyone
benefits "is thought to be theoretically uninteresting."

In the lab, Stephens said, "Animals defect very quickly. Our problem is why does
this happen. It is simple to get cooperation when it is in everybody's
short-term interest. There is no temptation to cheat."

Studies on altruism and cooperation are centered around a theoretical conundrum
known as "the iterated prisoner's dilemma." This is a repeated test of
trustworthiness. A single defection can offer a higher immediate reward, but a
more stable outcome is long-term cooperation between two individuals. Numerous
computer simulations of the iterated prisoner's dilemma have shown that the most
"evolutionary stable strategy" is sort of "tit-for-tat with forgiveness." That
is, prisoner A responds as Prisoner B does. But if Prisoner B defects once,
Prisoner A ignores it, and vice versa. Frequent defection means that the other
player has to respond in kind.

The trouble is, in the lab the blue jays did not behave the way the theory said
they should -- largely because of something called "temporal discounting,"
Stephens said.

"What we thought is that we know from other work that animals are very sensitive
to delay, and they really hate a delay. If you give them a choice between a
pathetic food option and good one 10 or 20 seconds later, they will often choose
the worse food payout," he said. "That's what our story is about: the connection
between impulsiveness and altruistic cooperation."

Stephens designed an experiment to motivate the blue jays to focus on the
long-term consequences of their behavior. The birds -- one "stooge" whose
actions were controlled by the experimenters, and one that was free to choose --
were trained to fly back and forth to two perches. Landing on one perch resulted
in a small reward for a bird. Landing on the "cooperation perch" gave a large
reward for the neighbor, but none for the chooser. A clear box, visible to the
birds, accumulated each bird's winning and released them, either right away or
after four rounds of the game.

When the rewards were dispensed immediately, the test bird always defected. But
when the stooge bird cooperated, there was a steady increase in the cooperation
of the "free" bird.

"When the food accumulated in that little box," Stephens said, "that forced them
to think of the long-term benefits."

The issue of forsaking weak, short-term rewards in favor of strong, long-term
ones is an essential problem of environmental policy. Forest, ocean and
atmosphere provide immediate value, but they also have a longer, stronger payout
over generations. Building these long-term values into our global policies is an
essential factor in the protection of the environment.

The blue jay experience is encouraging. It means if we can teach such a
cantankerous blue jay to cooperate, we might be able to learn it ourselves.

Dan Whipple

(108) Magpies, the most colorful in a noisy family

2007-05-26T23:20:00.000+02:00

On occasional summer mornings, I have been distracted by a raucous argument between family members. Not my family. Crows and magpies settle into the trees in my yard to shout insults and threats at one another.

The family Corvidae includes crows, ravens, magpies and jays. Crows, ravens and magpies are all large, conspicuous birds, known to be highly intelligent, and sharing the habit of eating the eggs and nestlings of songbirds.

The black-billed magpie, Pica pica, is currently recognized as 13 subspecies distributed across western North America, Europe, Asia and small parts of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The yellow-billed magpie, Pica nuttalli, is restricted to California.

Experimental studies of behavior have revealed that magpies have a concept of self; they recognize their own image. When most bird species are shown their reflection in a mirror, they attack their reflection, hoping to drive off the stranger. Magpies ignore their image in a mirror. Furthermore, if a red laser pen illuminates a dot on the breast of a magpie, and the magpie sees the red spot in a mirror, they immediately preen their breast, concerned that it is a wound or a drop of blood. At one time, it was thought that the concept of self elevated humans above all other species.

Magpies, like crows and ravens, are opportunistic omnivores that take eggs and nestlings whenever they are available. Magpies are clever predators; they sit quietly to watch songbirds build nests, or feed nestlings, planning their attacks. In spring, smaller birds will mob magpies, ravens and crows, to chase them from their nests or to punish them for thievery.

Magpies are known for their audacious and mischievous behavior; here is my favorite personal observation, just one anecdote.

A CU student tied her dog to a blue spruce at the entrance to the biology building and went in to attend a class. The dog, a placid golden retriever, was content to sit in the shade and watch the people walking by and the magpies cavorting on the lawn. One magpie approached the dog, squawking loudly. The dog rushed at the irritating bird to shoo it away, but was brought up short by the stout leash.

The magpie did a quick calculation, and the game began. The bird calculated the perimeter of the dog's space, and taunted the dog from the outer edge of the perimeter. The dog repeatedly lunged at the annoying bird, which did not flinch, but continued taunting. The dog, realizing the futility of the situation, retreated to the base of the tree, lay down and went to sleep.

The magpie would not be ignored. It flew into the tree, and carefully dropped to a branch just above the dog. It reached down, grabbed some hairs on the dog's head, yanked fiercely and jumped to the safe side of the perimeter. The retriever exploded, awaking tweaked and disoriented. Once again, it lunged at the magpie, and was again restrained by the leash. The magpie strutted in victory.

Millions of anecdotes over thousands of years have earned magpies a place in mythology, sometimes as a good omen, more frequently as an evil omen.

Jeff Mitton

(107) Crows learn soccer skills at Japanese zoo

2007-05-26T02:21:00.000+02:00

Birds learn soccer skills at Japanese zoo

6/14/2006 TOKYO (AP) — Soccer is for birds here — more specifically the crows.A flock of the birds dressed in soccer jerseys showed off their dribbling and shooting skills at a Japanese zoo as football fever gripped the nation.

A carrion crow wearing a Japan national soccer jersey dribbles a miniature ball toward a goal at a Japanese zoo. "We tried to coach owls and falcons as well, but the crows were the best," said zookeeper Satoru Tanaka.

The four young carrion crows at Tokuyama Zoo in western Japan used their beaks to dribble a miniature ball toward a soccer goal, sometimes tackling each other for possession before scoring, according to head zookeeper Satoru Tanaka.
The crows get tidbits every time they score, Tanaka said.
"We tried to coach owls and falcons as well, but the crows were the best. They're such intelligent creatures," he said. The birds have only received about a month's training, he added.
The zoo is now trying to teach the avian team to pass and take free kicks, according to Tanaka.

(106) Once again: The Raven - Edgar Allen Poe

2006-11-18T17:31:00.000+02:00

(105) Thinking bird lives up to trickster lore

2006-11-03T16:38:00.000+02:00

Thinking bird lives up to trickster lore

By Eric Sorensen
Seattle Times science reporter
Monday, January 06, 2003

FORKS, Clallam County — John Marzluff and I are sitting low in the front seat, whispering like cops on a stakeout.

We are trying to outwit a raven, which is no small feat. For while this striking, iconic creature of Northwest lore is big and slow, it is also one of the smartest animals on Earth. Some days, like today, it seems smarter than humans.

Marzluff, a University of Washington wildlife ecologist, is trying to lure a raven to a pile of white bread near the Olympic Correctional Center. He will then press a button on a remote control that will fire a .30-06 cartridge, which will launch a net over his quarry.

Marzluff has done this maybe 100 times on the Olympic Peninsula, trapping, banding and affixing radio locators to study the birds' distribution and behavior, their relationship with humans, their effects on species like marbled murrelets, their apparent family structures, breeding and territories. He wonders if the birds remember him.

"It's pretty amazing," he says. "I haven't trapped here in two years, and they still don't like a pile of bread."

Over the next few hours, his pile of bread is visited by two blacktailed deer and so many crows he has to replenish it. Ravens don't come close. He adds Cheetos. At last a fat, glorious raven, big as a hawk and bearing a long, curved beak, lands 20 feet from the trap. It gingerly walks in, closer, then closer still.

"It gets your heart beating when it gets like this," Marzluff says.

The raven does a jumping jack — a nervous hop and spread of the wings. He's in the zone, head down and unaware. Marzluff hits the switch.

It clicks.

Nothing.

Click.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Marzluff forgot to put fresh batteries in the remote. Score one for raven.

Songbird and more

The raven is the biggest songbird, measuring up to 2 feet long, as heavy as 4 pounds, but it hardly sings. Instead, it squawks, rattles, knocks, quorks, growls, murmurs like a bubbling brook, learns remarks like "nevermore," and imitates the crow, a cousin. From a distance, even experts confuse the raven with the crow, which is smaller, has a faster wing beat and lacks the raven's distinctive diamond-shaped tail and Roman nose.

Ravens can be found in cities like Anchorage and Riverside, Calif., but aside from a captive bird at the Woodland Park Zoo, they are a Seattle rarity. Yet they are one of our region's oldest icons, a wily, powerful figure from as far back as people remember.

To Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, raven is a magical shape-shifter, cosmic trickster, maker of mischief and giver of fire, light and food. His big head and hooked beak adorn canoes, totem poles, boxes, jewelry, weavings, baskets and petroglyphs.

Want to learn more?

John Marzluff will show slides of ravens and discuss how they use their intelligence to solve problems at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Adopt-A-Stream Foundation's Northwest Stream Center in McCollum Park, 600 128th St. S.E., Everett. Tickets, which are $4 for members and $6 for nonmembers, must be purchased in advance. For information, call 425-316-8592.

"A raven has a real strong presence, a real strong power," said George David, a Nuu-Chah-Nulth artist who was inspired by the bird to carve a splendid raven transformation mask. "When you see him he wants to be seen."

In Skokomish tribal legend, snow-white raven stole the sun, moon, stars, water and fire back from gray eagle at the request of the people. He hung the sun, moon and stars back up in the sky. He dropped the water, forming streams and lakes. He made fire available to the people, growing black from its smoke as he flew.

In Norse legend, two ravens fly out into the world and report back to Odin what they have seen and heard. Their names evoke the power of their brains: Hugin, for thought, and Munin, for mind.

This is fitting. While most animals are driven largely by the hard-wired dynamics of instinct, ravens and other birds in the corvid family think.

J.R. Inghram, who feeds and watches up to 2,000 ravens near his Grant County home, once had a pet raven that would turn on the carpet cleaner after messing the floor.

"After watching us, this guy would turn lights on in rooms and turn them off when he left," said Inghram.

What a bird brain

The raven at the Woodland Park Zoo solves puzzles to get food. When new handlers visit her aviary, she will untie their shoelaces and try to swipe food from the pouches they keep on their waists.
A raven at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle has been taught to deposit cans in recycle bins, demonstrating the birds’ penchant for hiding things. The bird also solves puzzles for food and likes to untie the shoes of handlers and steal food from pouches they carry.

"She'll still do it with all of us sometimes, but she knows with somebody new that she can really do it to them well," said Becky Barker, raptor keeper. "They are the trickster."

Sharks concentrate on smell, eagles concentrate on seeing, ravens just plain concentrate. They have one of the largest brains of any bird for its size.

A big brain is handy in several ways. Ravens can case out their food sources for potential predators, letting other birds investigate a roadkill, like the king's taster, before tasting themselves.

"Most of what they figure out is how to get food without getting killed in the process," said Marzluff. "That's their fundamental challenge."

A large brain also lets the raven deal with the office politics of its social hierarchy, remembering which birds it needs to avoid and which it can dominate, who it must fight, who it can work with.

"A lot of those kinds of social constructs that help animals function more efficiently in a group require memory and individual recognition," said Marzluff. "And to do that you start selecting for a big brain, instead of superkeen eyesight to see things three miles away. And also the kind of food they're going after, being generalists and animals that rely on booms and busts of food, you have to remember where things are and you have to be able to adapt to new kinds of foods in new situations. That all favors memory and learning and insight."

To this Marzluff adds another thought. The raven has been solving complex problems and living in complex societies for several million years, longer than the earliest human species.

"Here we were, relatively solitary ape," Marzluff said. "Ravens will give apes a battle in terms of memory abilities now. It's interesting to think they were smarter than us and now maybe it's the other way around."

Primates try, try again

Maybe.

Marzluff was out-ravened on his first day of trapping. The following day he tries again, camouflaging his net gun on a stretch of road toward La Push.

"This looks good to a primate," says Bill Webb, a Ph.D. student in wildlife science.

"You certainly don't see things like the raven," said Marzluff.

Ravens often spend the morning cruising roads for fresh roadkill. Webb and Erik Neatherlin, one of Marzluff's former graduate students, help draw birds in by trailing Cheetos up to the trap.

Marzluff watches through binoculars from more than 100 yards away, this time with a radio-controlled remote and fresh batteries.

He hands me the remote and tells me to push the button on his cue.

Before I can marshal some argument about journalists getting involved in a story, two ravens come in, take turns investigating the pile of bread by the trap and fly off. Marzluff, eager to study the dynamics of a mating pair, wants to trap both.

One returns and approaches the trap. The second bird, ostensibly the female, lands nearby, a Cheeto in her beak. The male picks up a piece of bread. I'm worried he will fly off and the female, already happy with a Cheeto and out of the trap's range, will join him.

My pulse is roaring.

"Let it go!" Marzluff says.

In the leisure of retrospect, this can be interpreted in two ways: Let the bird fly away or let the net be released.

Marzluff meant to let the bird go. My brain went the other way; my shaking, jittery hand hit the button.

We get one bird, a spectacular creature with a 3-inch beak like ebony-glazed statuary and a plumage of black fractals.

This bird's capture is enough to score one for the primates.

"I've been watching this pair for years," says Neatherlin, who chased ravens across the peninsula for his graduate work, "and have never been able to trap it."

But catching one bird is maddeningly short of the two we should have had. The second raven may have learned to avoid a pile of bread.

And I have learned that, going up against a raven, it is possible to feel like an idiot.

( See also post 76 )

(104) It takes a thief to know a thief

2006-10-14T05:59:00.000+02:00

Scientists say scrub jays are not stuck in the present

Mental time-travel, the ability to use memories of past experiences and plan for the future, has traditionally been considered a quality unique to humans. Now scientists at the University of Cambridge have identified the same ability in a bird - the Western scrub jay, [a US native] similar to the British jay.

In a paper published this week in Nature magazine they describe laboratory tests which show that scrub jays who have experience of stealing food from other birds? hidden caches seem to use this knowledge when hiding their own supplies.

"To our knowledge this is the first experimental demonstration that a non-human animal shows elements of mental time-travel," says Prof. Nicky Clayton who conducted the research with her husband, Dr Nathan Emery.

Prof. Clayton first observed the behaviour during lunch hours spent in the grounds of the University of California, Davis. She noticed that there was fierce competition between scrub jays for lunch scraps left behind by students and staff. In order to protect their hard-won scraps the birds would hide their winnings, Prof. Clayton noticed that some scrub jays went even further - returning to re-bury the treasure when their rivals had left the scene.

Prof. Clayton and Dr Emery thought that such behaviour was probably intended to minimise pilfering by observers. They tested the hypothesis in a series of laboratory trials in which the birds were allowed to cache either in private, or while observed by another jay, and then Recover their caches in private.

One group was given the opportunity to steal other birds' hidden food caches: the other was not. The thieves re-hid their own food caches if they were observed when first hiding the food: the more innocent scrub jays, who had no experience of stealing from hidden caches, did not exhibit the same cunning.

These findings are a major development in the contentious field of animal cognition. Scientists have long debated whether animals demonstrate planning and conscious thought or an understanding that some events are in the past and some can guide how an individual should behave in the future.

This research also has implications for the 'theory of mind' - the ability to read another individual's intentions, beliefs and desires. In human infants this ability develops around the third year of life but it has yet to be demonstrated convincingly in animals.

"The re-caching behaviour of the experienced scrub jays and the projection of their own experience (pilfering) to the intentions of another bird demonstrates some of the hallmarks of theory of mind. Since re-caching is not dependent on the potential thief being present, the experienced jay must be using some cognitive ability to perform this behaviour; something only chimpanzees and other great apes have been suggested to do," suggests Dr Emery.

As mental time-travel is an essential part of 'theory of mind?, competitive caching may present a useful model to test further whether scrub jays can get into the mind of another bird.

For a long time the search for animal cognition concentrated on attempts to train animals, mainly primates, to reproduce human skills such as language. In the last few years there has been a paradigm shift - researchers are now more interested in studying the way animals behave in their own habitats. Clayton and Emery's findings would seem to vindicate those who have adopted the new approach.

Professor Uta Frith, University College London

"The beauty and originality of Clayton and Emery's work is that it has opened up ways of looking at the role of learning from experience in relation to innate behaviour patterns in complex social interactions. Birds are providing an imperfect but extremely revealing mirror to us. They let us see the behaviours we most treasure as part of being human in a new light".

Professor John Pearce, University of Cardiff and author of "Animal learning and cognition"

" The demonstration by Clayton and Emery that scrub jays are more likely to move food from one hiding place to another, if they were observed by other scrub jays when originally hiding the food, by itself is a remarkable finding. But to demonstrate that this effect depends upon the birds already having stolen food hidden by other scrub jays is quite extraordinary and has far- reaching theoretical implications. It suggests that scrub jays may possess sophisticated thought processes that allow them to anticipate and outwit the actions of other birds. If this is true, then scrub jays will be the only non-human species that can be said to possess a theory of mind.".

Notes for editors

1. Scrub jays are highly territorial - they hide food for future consumption, and rely on memory to recover these caches at a later date. But caching also has costs because these food stores can be found and taken by other birds. So in a competitive existence these birds need strategies to maximise their ability to recover the caches of other birds as well as their own, and counter strategies to prevent theft by pilfering competitors.

2. Nicky Clayton and Nathan Emery are a husband and wife research team. The publication of their Nature paper coincides with their joint birthday.

For further information please contact:

1. Prof. Nicky Clayton Tel: Email: nsc22@cam.ac.uk

2. Dr Nathan Emery Tel: Email: nje23@cam.ac.uk

3. Stuart Hogarth Tel: Email: sh339@cam.ac.uk

© Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge
Information provided by webmaster@psychol.cam.ac.uk

LINK

(103) The Rooks of Newstead

2006-10-13T23:12:00.000+02:00

Newstead Abbey : The Rooks - October 2002

The rooks of Newstead were believed to be the souls of the 'Black Monks' as they were seen to observe the Sabbath...

Washington Irving, the author of the famous American ghost story 'Legend of Sleepy Hollow' stayed at Newstead in the 1800s.

He noted with interest that each morning the rooks would fly away, en mass, to sweep the countryside for food.

They would return in a similar manner in the evening, where their discussion of the days events would echo around the estate.

Irving was told that the rooks observed the Sabbath; they set out every day except Sunday, when they stayed in the abbey grounds.

He didn't believe this until he saw it for himself. Indeed it appeared that the rooks visited their neighbours and friends, devoting Sunday to their nearest and dearest, but didn't leave the estate.

Irving tells us that the local tradition had it that the rooks at Newstead were the souls of the 'Black Monks' reborn as birds, still occupying their old abbey.

Indeed so strongly was this belief held that, contrary to common country practice, the Newstead rooks were not shot, and were generally left unhindered.

LINK

(103) Clever Rooks

2006-10-13T20:11:00.000+02:00

Clever rooks

There's a new paper out by the group of Nicky Clayton, Cambridge, in the April 4 issue of Current Biology. I know Nicky from the Social Science Research Council sponsored workshop "Behavioral Organization in Animals" in Bodega Bay (see program).
In their study, the researchers used the popular ‘trap-tube’ task to assay the extent of physical cognition (specifically, an understanding of the operation of gravity) in rooks. In the experiment, food is placed inside a horizontal tube which has a vertical, blind-ended tube attached to it. The animals had to push (or pull) the item from the appropriate end of the tube using a stick, so that they do not lose the item in the trap. Seven out of eight rooks learned the task and all seven passed a transfer test, in which the food had to be dropped into the trap to be accessible (see picture).

The authors hypothesize that the rooks have a sense of gravity ("physical cognition") and may use learning to abstract rules to acquire it.
There was a fairly recent (2002) report in the journal Science by Weir, Chappell and Kacelnik, who showed that New Caledonian crows are able to shape unfamiliar materials to create a usable tool for a specific task.
These corvids don't have birdbrains, it seems

bjoern, 04 April 2006

This news item is from bjoern.brembs.net - a neuroscientist's blog
http://bjoern.brembs.net/comment.php?comment.news.80

(102) In The Shadow Of The Raven

2006-10-07T21:40:00.000+02:00

(101) Castaneda and The Silvery Birds

2006-08-12T17:19:00.000+02:00

From "The Teachings of Don Juan - A Yaqui Way of Knowledge":

Wednesday, 27 January 1965
On Tuesday 19 January, I smoked again the hallucinogenic mixture. I had told don Juan I felt very apprehensive about the smoke, and that it frightened me. He said I had to try it again to evaluate it with justice.
We walked into his room. It was almost two o'clock in the afternoon. He brought out the pipe. I got the charcoals, then we sat facing each other. He said he was going to warm up the pipe and awaken her, and if I watched carefully I would see how she glowed. He put the pipe to his lips three or four times, and sucked through it. He rubbed it tenderly. Suddenly he nodded, almost imperceptibly, to signal me to look at the pipe's awakening. I looked, but I couldn't see it.
He handed the pipe to me. I filled the bowl with my own mixture, and then picked a burning charcoal with a pair of tweezers I had made from a wooden clothespin and had been saving for this occasion. Don Juan looked at my tweezers and began to laugh. I vacillated for a moment, and the charcoal stuck to the tweezers. I was afraid to tap them against the pipe bowl, and I had to spit on the charcoal to put it out.
Don Juan turned his head away and covered his face with his arm. His body shook. For a moment I thought he was crying, but he was laughing silently.
The action was interrupted for a long time; then he swiftly picked up a charcoal himself, put it in the bowl, and ordered me to smoke. It required quite an effort to suck through the mixture; it seemed to be very compact. After the first try I felt I had sucked the fine powder into my mouth. It numbed my mouth immediately. I saw the glow in the bowl, but I never felt the smoke as the smoke of a cigarette is felt. Yet I had the sensation of inhaling something, something that filled my lungs first and then pushed itself down to fill the rest of my body.
I counted twenty inhalations, and then the count did not matter any longer. I began to sweat; don Juan looked at me fixedly and told me not to be afraid and to do exactly as he said. I tried to say 'all right', but instead I made a weird, howling sound. It went on resounding after I had closed my mouth. The sound startled don Juan, who had another attack of laughter. I wanted to say 'yes' with my head, but I couldn't move.
Don Juan opened my hands gently and took the pipe away. He ordered me to lie down on the floor, but not to fall asleep. I wondered if he was going to help me lie down but he did not. He just stared at me uninterruptedly. All of a sudden I saw the room tumbling, and I was looking at don Juan from a position on my side. From that point on the images became strangely blurry, as in a dream. I can vaguely recall hearing don Juan talk to me a great deal during the time I was immobilized.
I did not experience fear, or unpleasantness, during the state itself, nor was I sick upon awakening the next day. The only thing out of the ordinary was that I could not think clearly for some time after waking up. Then gradually, in a period of four or five hours, I became myself again.

Wednesday, 20 January 1965
Don Juan did not talk about my experience, nor did he ask me to relate it to him. His sole comment was that I had fallen asleep too soon.
'The only way to stay awake is to become a bird, or a cricket, or something of the son,' he said.
'How do you do that, don Juan?'
'That is what I am teaching you. Do you remember what I said to you yesterday while you were without your body?"
' I can't recall clearly.'
'I am a crow. I am teaching you how to become a crow. When you learn that, you will stay awake, and you will move freely; otherwise you will always be glued to the ground, wherever you fall'

Sunday, 7 February 1965
My second attempt with the smoke took place about midday on Sunday 31 January. I woke up the following day in the early evening. I had the sensation of possessing an unusual power to recollect whatever don Juan had said to me during the experience. His words were imprinted on my mind. I kept on hearing them with extraordinary clarity and persistence. During this attempt another fact became obvious to me: my entire body had become numb soon after I began to swallow the fine powder, which got into my mouth every time I sucked the pipe. Thus I not only inhaled the smoke, but also ingested the mixture.
I tried to narrate my experience to don Juan; he said I had done nothing important. I mentioned that I could remember everything that had happened, but he did not want to hear about it. Every memory was precise and unmistakable. The smoking procedure had been the same as in the previous attempt. It was almost as if the two experiences were perfectly juxtaposable, and I could start my recollection from the time the first experience ended. I clearly remembered that from the time I fell to the ground on my side I was completely devoid of feeling or thought. Yet my clarity was not impaired in any way. I remember thinking my last thought at about the time the room became a vertical plane: ' I must have clunked my head on the floor, yet I don't feel any pain."
From that point on I could only see and hear. I could repeat every word don Juan had said. I followed each one of his directions. They seemed clear, logical, and easy. He said that my body was disappearing and only my head was going to remain, and in such a condition the only way to stay awake and move around was by becoming a crow. He commanded me to make an effort to wink, adding that whenever I was capable of winking I would be ready to proceed. Then he told me that my body had vanished completely and all I had was my head; he said the head never disappears because the head is what turns into a crow.
He ordered me to wink. He must have repeated this command, and all his other commands countless times, because I could remember all of them with extraordinary clarity. I must have winked, because he said I was ready and ordered me to straighten up my head and put it on my chin. He said that in the chin were the crow's legs. He commanded me to feel the legs and observe that they were coming out slowly. He then said that I was not solid yet, that I had to grow a tail, and that the tail would come out of my neck. He ordered me to extend the tail like a fan, and to feel how it swept the floor.
Then he talked about the crow's wings, and said they would come out of my cheekbones. He said it was hard and painful. He commanded me to unfold them. He said they had to be extremely long, as long as I could stretch them, otherwise I would not be able to fly. He told me the wings were coming out and were long and beautiful, and that I had to flap them until they were real wings.
He talked about the top of my head next and said it was still very large and heavy, and its bulk would prevent my flying. He told me that the way to reduce its size was by winking; with every wink my head would become smaller. He ordered me to wink until the top weight was gone and I could jump freely. Then he told me I had reduced my head to the size of a crow, and that I had to walk around and hop until I had lost my stiffness.
There was one last thing I had to change, he said, before I could fly. It was the most difficult change, and to accomplish it I had to be docile and do exactly as he told me. I had to learn to see like a crow. He said that my mouth and nose were going to grow between my eyes until I had a strong beak. He said that crows see straight to the side, and commanded me to turn my head and look at him with one eye. He said that if I wanted to change and look with the other eye I had to shake my beak down, and that that movement would make me look through the other eye. He ordered me to shift from one eye to the other. And then he said I was ready to fly, and that the only way to fly was to have him toss me into the air.
I had no difficulty whatsoever eliciting the corresponding sensation to each one of his commands. I had the perception of growing bird's legs, which were weak and wobbly at first. I felt a tail coming out of the back of my neck and wings out of my cheekbones. The wings were folded deeply. I felt them coming out by degrees. The process was hard but not painful. Then I winked my head down to the size of a crow. But the most astonishing effect was accomplished with my eyes. My bird's sight!

When don Juan directed me to grow a beak, I had an annoying sensation of lack of air. Then something bulged out and created a block in front of me. But it was not until don Juan directed me to see laterally that my eyes actually were capable of having a full view to the side. I could wink one eye at a time and shift the focusing from one eye to the other. But the sight of the room and all the things in it was not like an ordinary sight. Yet it was impossible to tell in what way it was different. Perhaps it was lopsided, or perhaps things were out of focus. Don Juan became very big and glowy. Something about him was comforting and safe. Then the images blurred; they lost their outlines, and became sharp abstract patterns that flickered for a while.

Sunday, 28 March 1965
On Thursday 18 March I smoked again the hallucinogenic mixture. The initial procedure was different in small details. I had to refill the pipe bowl once. After I had finished the first batch, don Juan directed me to clean the bowl, but he poured the mixture into the bowl himself because I lacked muscular co-ordination. It took a great deal of effort to move my arms. There was enough mixture in my bag for one refill. Don Juan looked at the bag and said this was my last attempt with the smoke until the next year because I had used up all my provisions.
He turned the little bag inside out and shook the dust into the dish that held the charcoals. It burned with an orange glow, as if he had placed a sheet of transparent material over the charcoals. The sheet burst into flame, and then it cracked into an intricate pattern of lines. Something zigzagged inside the lines at high speed. Don Juan told me to look at the movement in the lines. I saw something that looked like a small marble rolling back and forth in the glowing area. He leaned over, put his hand into the glow, picked out the marble, and placed it in the pipe bowl. He ordered me to take a puff. I had a clear impression that he had put the small ball into the pipe so that I would inhale it. In a moment the room lost its horizontal position. I felt a profound numbness, a sensation of heaviness.

When I awakened, I was lying on my back at the bottom of a shallow irrigation ditch, immersed in water up to my chin. Someone was holding my head up. It was don Juan. The first thought I had was that the water in the channel had an unusual quality; it was cold and heavy. It slapped lightly against me, and my thoughts cleared with every movement it made. At first the water had a bright green halo, or fluorescence, which soon dissolved, leaving only a stream of ordinary water.
I asked don Juan about the time of day. He said it was early morning. After a while I was completely awake, and got out of the water.
' You must tell me all you saw,' don Juan said when we got to his house. He also said he had been trying to 'bring me back' for three days, and had had a very difficult time doing it. I made numerous attempts to describe what I had seen, but I could not concentrate. Later on, during the early evening, I felt I was ready to talk with don Juan, and I began to tell him what I remembered from the time I had fallen on my side, but he did not want to hear about it. He said the only interesting part was what I saw and did after he' tossed me into the air and I flew away'.
All I could remember was a series of dreamlike images or scenes. They had no sequential order. I had the impression that each one of them was like an isolated bubble, floating into focus and then moving away. They were not, however, merely scenes to look at. I was inside them. I took part in them. When I tried to recollect them at first, I had the sensation that they were vague, diffused flashes, but as I thought about them I realized that each one of them was extremely clear although totally unrelated to ordinary seeing - hence, the sensation of vagueness. The images were few and simple.
As soon as don Juan mentioned that he had 'tossed me into the air' I had a faint recollection of an absolutely clear scene in which I was looking straight at him from some distance away. I was looking at his face only. It was monumental in size. It was flat and had an intense glow. His hair was yellowish, and it moved. Each part of his face moved by itself, projecting a sort of amber light.
.
The next image was one in which don Juan had actually tossed me up, or hurled me, in a straight onward direction. I remember I 'extended my wings and flew'. I felt alone, cutting through the air, painfully moving straight ahead. It was more like walking than like flying. It tired my body. There was no feeling of flowing free, no exuberance.
Then I remembered an instant in which I was motionless, looking at a mass of sharp, dark edges set in an area that had a dull, painful light; next I saw a field with an infinite variety of lights. The lights moved and flickered and changed their luminosity. They were almost like colours. Their intensity dazzled me.
At another moment, an object was almost against my eye. It was a thick, pointed object; it had a definite pinkish glow. I felt a sudden tremor somewhere in my body and saw a multitude of similar pink forms coming towards me. They all moved on me. I jumped away.
The last scene I remembered was three silvery birds. They radiated a shiny, metallic light, almost like stainless steel, but intense and moving and alive. I liked them. We flew together.
Don Juan did not make any comments on my recounting.

Tuesday, 23 March 1965
The following conversation took place the next day, after the
recounting of my experience.
Don Juan said: ' It does not take much to become a crow. You did it and now you will always be one.'
'What happened after I became a crow, don Juan? Did I fly for three days?'
'No, you came back at nightfall as I had told you to.'
' But how did I come back?'
'You were very tired and went to sleep. That is all.'
'I mean did I fly back?'
'I have already told you. You obeyed me and came back to the house. But don't concern yourself with that matter. It is of no importance."
' What is important, then?'

'In your whole trip there was only one thing of great value the silvery birds!'
' What was so special about them ? They were just birds.'
'Not just birds - they were crows."
'Were they white crows, don Juan?'
'The black feathers of a crow are really silvery. The crows shine so intensely that they are not bothered by other birds.'
'Why did their feathers look silvery?'
' Because you were seeing as a crow sees. A bird that looks dark to us looks white to a crow. The white pigeons, for instance, are pink or bluish to a crow; seagulls are yellow. Now, try to remember how you joined them.' [see also post 51: Birds and UV vision" ]
I thought about it, but the birds were a dim, disassociated image which had no continuity. I told him I could remember only that I felt I had flown with them. He asked me whether I had joined them in the air or on the ground, but I could not possibly answer that. He became almost angry with me. He demanded that I think about it. He said: 'All this will not mean a damn; it will be only a mad dream unless you remember correctly.' I strained myself to recollect, but I could not.

Saturday, 3 April 1965
Today I thought of another image in my 'dream' about the silvery birds. I remembered seeing a dark mass with myriads of pinholes. In fact, the mass was a dark cluster of little holes. I don't know why I thought it was soft. As I was looking at it, three birds flew straight at me. One of them made a noise; then all three of them were next to me on the ground.
I described the image to don Juan. He asked me from what direction the birds had come. I said I couldn't possibly determine that. He became quite impatient and accused me of being inflexible in my thinking. He said I could very well remember if I tried to, and that I was afraid to let myself become less rigid. He said that I was thinking in terms of men and crows, and that I was neither a man nor a crow at the time that I wanted to recollect.
He asked me to remember what the crow had said to me. I tried to think about it, but my mind played on scores of other things instead. I couldn't concentrate.

Sunday, 4 April 1965
I took a long hike today. It got quite dark before I reached don Juan's house. I was thinking about the crows when suddenly a very strange 'thought' crossed my mind. It was more like an impression or a feeling than a thought. The bird that had made the noise said they were coming from the north and were going south, and when we met again they would be coming the same way.
I told don Juan what I had thought up, or maybe remembered. He said,' Don't think about whether you remembered it or made it up. Such thoughts fit men only. They do not fit crows, especially those you saw, for they are the emissaries of your fate. You are already a crow. You will never change that. From now on the crows will tell you with their flight about every turn of your fate. In which direction did you fly with them?'
' I couldn't know that, don Juan!'
'If you think properly you will remember. Sit on the floor and tell me the position in which you were when the birds flew to you. Close your eyes and make a line on the floor.'
I followed his suggestion and determined the point.
' Don't open your eyes yet!' He proceeded, ' In which direction did you all fly in relation to that point?'
I made another mark on the ground.
Taking these points of orientation as a reference, don Juan interpreted the different patterns of flight the crows would observe to foretell my personal future or fate. He set up the four points of the compass as the axis of the crows' flight.
I asked him whether the crows always followed the cardinal points to tell a man's fate. He said that the orientation was mine alone; whatever the crows did in my first meeting with them was of crucial importance. He insisted on my recalling every detail, for the message and the pattern of the 'emissaries' were an individual, personalized matter.
There was one more thing he insisted I should remember3 and that was the time of day when the emissaries left me. He asked me to think of the difference in the light around me between the time when I 'began to fly' and the time when the silvery birds ' flew with me'. When I first had the sensation of painful flight, it was dark. But when I saw the birds, everything was reddish light red, or perhaps orange.
He said: 'That means it was late in the day; the sun was not down yet. When it is completely dark a crow is blind with whiteness and not with darkness, the way we are at night. This indication of the time places your last emissaries at the end of the day. They will call you, and as they fly above your head, they will become silvery white; you will see them shining against the sky, and it will mean your time is up. It will mean you are going to die and become a crow yourself.'
'What if I see them during the morning?'
' You won't see them in the morning!'
' But crows fly all day.'
'Not your emissaries, you fool!'
'How about your emissaries, don Juan?'
'Mine will come in the morning. There will also be three of them. My benefactor told me that one could shout them back to black if one does not want to die. But now I know it can't be done. My benefactor was given to shouting, and to all the clatter and violence of the devil's weed. I know the smoke is different because he has no passion. He is fair. When your silvery emissaries come for you, there is no need to shout at them. Just fly with them as you have already done. After they have collected you they will reverse directions, and there will be four of them flying away."

(100) Castaneda and the Raven

2006-07-13T22:03:00.000+02:00

Los Angeles, August 3, 1997

I could have asked him anything.
"I am your prisoner," Carlos Castaneda said.
We talked about ravens. I specifically wanted to know how one could tell when a raven wasn't really a raven.
"You look at its energy," Castaneda said. "A raven that's a sorcerer glows amber."

He didn't tell me what color a regular raven glowed. But then, it wouldn't have mattered anyway since I don't see pure energy. Castaneda does, says he has for many years. He began seeing humans as energy forms, or "luminous eggs," in the cafeteria of UCLA when he was working on his doctorate in anthropology some 30 years ago.

That's how my lunch with Carlos Castaneda began. It was a Thursday, 2 p.m. We met at a Cuban restaurant near West Hollywood. I didn't know till the last moment where I'd be meeting Castaneda. His staff said that's how Castaneda does it. He reads energy to determine meeting locations and most other matters.

"Everything that we know is an interpretation of energy," Castaneda said. For the longest time I feared I'd have to find Castaneda in L.A. without directions as a test of my unbending intent and worthiness to speak to the enigmatic cult legend and author of nine bestsellers, including his classic "The Teachings of don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge."

So there we were, just two luminous eggs having lunch. In my best Spanish I ordered moros y cristianos (what Cubans call white rice and black beans) y tostones (fried plantains). He looked up from his menu and in perfect English ordered: "Number 12." Steak and potatoes.

I felt muy estupido.

The interview came about because of Castaneda's Tensegrity workshop, which is coming to Phoenix next weekend. I was told by his people that I would have to fly to L.A. because Castaneda does not do interviews over the phone. In fact he rarely does interviews at all. Whole decades have passed without a glimpse of Castaneda. Then he'd surface. A lecture here. A lecture there. Only to disappear again.

Having read all nine of his books (several times) and sharing a common interest in cultural anthropology, metaphysics and, especially, Yaqui mysticism, my assemblage point-a Castaneda term for perception center-was all aquiver at this rare opportunity.

However, I was told there were ground rules, including no photos and no tape recorder. I was allowed to use a laptop, but opted to just listen and remember (although I did take a few notes blindly under the table on a reporter's notebook).

In retrospect, and in the tradition of shaman synchronicity, I suppose this lunch wasn't really an accident at all, Just two weeks before the interview I had mentioned to someone that I was surprised my path had not yet crossed Carlos Castaneda's.

And then there was this raven.

Several days before I learned of the interview, I was awakened at six in the morning by the booming caw-caw-caw of the largest raven I had ever seen. It was sitting on the top stalk of a soaptree yucca outside my screened patio. Its call was so loud that the echoes reverberated off nearby mountains, creating an effect similar to thunder. I approached the bird but it was not afraid. It looked at me once then focused its total attention back to filling the air with vocalizations. I took my eye off the bird for only a moment to see how my cats were reacting. When I looked up the raven had disappeared.

Castaneda was interested in my raven story, but he didn't offer an explanation. Ravens and crows, as all shape shifters know, are popular forms of travel in the Americas.

Relatively little is known about Castaneda. De-emphasizing self and erasing personal history is the way Castaneda's line of seers has evolved into warriors of true knowledge. It's also why photos and voice imprints are prohibited.

"There is nothing to Carlos Castaneda," he said. "Personality is a pretense. Fame? Success? Who gives a (expletive)? If we weren't so involved in ourselves, we wouldn't do such barbaric things to ourselves."

Yet, there are some records, and Castaneda himself lets slip a personal fillip now and then. Apparently Castaneda was born around 70 years ago in Peru and was reared by a hedonistic grandfather. But he has spent most of his life in Los Angeles. He graduated from Hollywood High School and received his Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA. For a brief time, he taught cultural anthropology at the University of California-Irvine.

Castaneda does not stand out in a crowd. In fact, you probably wouldn't even see him in a crowd. He's diminutive, not much taller than 5 feet and probably less than 90 pounds. His substantial hair is mostly gray and brushed forward. He likes to joke about how people have described him as looking like someone's gardener or chauffeur or a Mexican waiter. L.A. writer Bruce Wagner once asked Castaneda how he should describe what he looks like. Castaneda suggested Lee Marvin.

Sitting across from me, dressed in an amber, short-sleeve buttoned shirt and khaki pants, hair mussed, he reminded me of an iconoclastic professor retired, the professor of not doing, doing lunch. Except this professor has the eye of the sorcerer, the left one, that grabs at your awareness with unimaginable force.

But all the descriptions are deceptive and fragile. Castaneda doesn't have one look. He has many. His appearance changes with his moods, which shuffle easily. Like his teachers don Juan and don Genero, he laughs, he curses, he makes unearthly voices and exaggerated smacking sounds with his lips. Then he turns fierce as he cogently and eloquently pours out his thoughts on the nature of things.

Castaneda is complex, I expected that. At times he talks in a different language. I expected that, too. It's impossible for most of us luminous eggs to understand all the ideas. Don Juan said that we understand nothing anyway, and that true knowledge is not accomplished through our intellects.

I didn't expect Castaneda's immense humor. "We must laugh to balance us," he said.

He told stories, that cannot be repeated in this publication. I believe he keeps up on current events. He was especially interested in the story of Virginia fertility specialist Cecil Jacobson, who is now in prison for using his own semen to impregnate up to 70 of his patients.

There was no discussion of peyote or Mescalito or little smoke, but he did illustrate for me on a napkin how to cut off the top of a barrel cactus and recover its juice.

"You drink just a little for rejuvenation," Castaneda said, and smacked his lips approvingly.

Arizona is particularly prominent in the Castaneda saga. He met Don Juan in Nogales, Ariz., and spent much time in our state during his apprenticeship and even later. Castaneda's eyes became moist when he recalled the Arizona years.

"Arizona is a magical place," Castaneda said. "The Sonoran Desert has a specific confluence." He said he could not go back to Arizona because it brings back too many strong and poignant memories.

"A warrior knows whatever he sees he will not see again," Castaneda said. "I would seriously weep. I need all my strength.

We are all alone.

Castaneda didn't like his steak. He said it smelled like excrement. He dismissed it, then plowed on to another thought: "The universe is not predictable no matter what scientists tell you," Castaneda said.

It's a theme he hits hard upon, and that we are truly all alone. "God doesn't love, you, believe me." The problem, Castaneda insists, is that we're so trapped in our own egos, we never see the bigger picture of existence. We are not individuals surrounded by other individuals or houses or shopping malls.

"We are individuals surrounded by infinity. Castaneda is vague on how he spends his day, but he still writes. Next year Simon & Schuster will issue a 30th-anniversary edition of "The Teachings of Don Juan A Yaqui Way of Knowledge," with a new foreword by Castaneda. There will also be a new book next year published by HarperCollins, "Magical Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico." Castaneda has also completed what he calls his "last book" with the working title "The Active Side of Infinity."

"I don't think I can write anymore," Castaneda said. "The universe is predatorial. It produces profound waves of sadness that are homing in on me. This ontological sadness, you see it coming, then you feel it on top of you."

Even the path with heart is no cakewalk. Castaneda may not be with us much longer. He has told his staff as much. "But he won't die a physical death," said Tensegrity instructor or "energy tracker" Kylie Lundahl. "He will disappear the way Don Juan did. He knows there isn't much time left before that happens."

The goal of don Juan's line of Mexican seers has been to complete what they call the "abstract flight," to "evanesce with the totality of their beings" into infinity-disappear with their boots on, so to speak. Castaneda's teacher don Juan and his party are supposed to have done this in 1973.

But Castaneda may have a problem in this regard. One gets the feeling from reading his later books and from personal conversation that something is wrong, and that Lee Marvin is scared.

Before he left this world don Juan Matus made it clear to Castaneda and his other apprentices that this line of Mexican seers of antiquity would end with Castaneda, the last nagual. Something in the energy configuration of the seers left behind was not propitious to continue the line. So, in essence, Castaneda and his party were left with the task of "closing out" the line.

Is it possible that Castaneda, like E.T., has been stranded in this world? Is there something don Juan neglected to tell him about storing enough personal energy for the abstract flight?

During our lunch, which lasted nearly three hours, I couldn't help but disengage myself occasionally from his left eye and wonder what he saw irradiating from my energy body-no doubt something nasty and pink front all the years of loading up on diet colas and sugar-free gum.

I also wondered whether he knew more about that raven than he was letting on. We said our good-byes in the restaurant's parking lot. He said he liked me and enjoyed our conversation. I said: Somos monos extranos. We are strange apes.

He smiled, but didn't answer. He didn't need to. For a moment Castaneda's predatorial universe hooked me with one of its waves of sadness as I remembered what he had said about a warrior knowing whatever he sees he will not see again.

I took a few steps toward my rental car, wondering whether Castaneda would indeed make that connection with his abstract flight. I sincerely hoped so.

When I looked back, Castaneda, like the raven, had vanished.

Sidebar: "This Is The One You Have Been Waiting For!"

Thomas Ropp.

(99) Oldest Crow died

2006-07-08T20:21:00.000+02:00

Crow Believed to Be Oldest in World Dies
By Associated Press
Fri Jul 7, 10:53 PM

BEARSVILLE, N.Y. - There's no way to prove Tata was the world's oldest crow when he died Sunday at age 59. But an expert on crows says it's possible.

Tata's tale began in 1947 when a thunderstorm blew the fledgling out of his nest in a Long Island cemetery, a mishap that likely led to his long life. Injured and unable to fly, the bird was scooped up by a cemetery caretaker and brought to a local family with a reputation for taking care of animals, Tata's most recent owner, Kristine Flones, told the Daily Freeman of Kingston.

"He was never able to fly, so he became their family pet," said Flones, a wildlife rehabilitator in the Woodstock, N.Y., hamlet of Bearsville, 95 miles north of New York City.

The Manetta family took care of Tata for more than half a century but gave the bird to Flones in 2001 because of their own health problems.

Blinded by cataracts and 54 years old when she got him, Tata was still a wonderful pet, Flones said.

"When you came around him, his energy was very beautiful," she told the newspaper. "It was as if he were exuding or giving off a loving energy."

"It's an incredibly old bird," said Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at Cornell University who has studied crows for more than 20 years. "They don't live that old in the wild."

McGowan said the oldest living crow he has documented in the wild is a bird he banded as a fledgling and has tracked for 15 years. There is an unsubstantiated claim of a 29- or 30-year-old crow in the wild, but he knows of no older crows, tame or otherwise.

While claims of animal longevity are tough to verify, McGowan said, "This one sounded pretty reasonable to me."

In an environment without predators, communicable disease or the likelihood of a fatal accident, a crow could grow as old as Tata, he said.

Flones said Tata was still active and alert in his later years, to the point each spring that he called out from inside the house to crows outside, often loudly and beginning at 5 a.m.

(98) Black Crow

2006-07-04T02:25:00.000+02:00

Black crow

He sees the stormy anger of the world
And wants no part of it at all
And as the weeping leaves of Autumn curl
He feels the savage winter call
See far below the dust of conflict settles on the hill
Where there was no escape before
And as he spreads his wings and soars up to another level
He brings the icy prophecies of war

Black crow, black crow, tell me where you really go
When you fly into the sunset, high in evening sky,
Black crow, black crow, tell me what you really know
Will we flourish in this hurricane, or will we fall and die?

While children lose their souls and so much more
To ragged armies of the field
A vicious fanfare cries appeasing hungry savages
To trigger that their fate is surely sealed
I wonder if that black crow sleeps as day beckons the night
Or if he even sleeps at all
I wonder what he thinks of all the human traffic passing far below
That's sturggled on the road for so, so long

Black crow, black crow, solely you pass above
Understanding everything but you know nothing at all
Black crow, black crow, tell me what you really know
do you understand the pain that we feel down here at all?

Black crow, black crow, tell me where you really go
When you fly into the sunset, high in evening sky,
Black crow, black crow, tell me what you really know
Will we flourish in this hurricane, or will we fall and die?
Will we flourish in this hurricane, or will we fall and die?
Will we flourish in this hurricane, or will we fall and die?

~JAMIROQUAI

(97) Night Crow

2006-04-17T15:40:00.000+02:00

Night Crow

When I saw that clumsy crow

Flap from a wasted tree,

A shape in the mind rose up:

Over the gulfs of dream

Flew a tremendous bird

Further and further away

Into a moonless black

Deep in the brain, far back.

-- Theodore Roethke, 1940

(96) Black Dakini

2006-04-11T11:43:00.000+02:00

Black Dakini

The Dark Face of the Void

--------------------------------------------------------------

I am the black dakini, goddess of the Void
I am the night sky empty of stars
the lake without reflections
When I take on human form, I am wrathful in appearance
With skin and hair that is blue-black
And jewelry that is of jet and ebony

In a sky of deep sapphire blue
I sit on a lotus with petals of gold,
and a center of black velvet
When I have two hands, I hold the vajra and bell
When I have four hands, I also hold the noose and the goad
In my six armed form, I add the axe and the mala.

My true form is in the depths of space,
The vast reaches of silence
But with the sound of HUM I emerge,
in the form of a spinning black vajra edged in gold
Around me are HUMS like beads on a string
Spinning, exploding, shooting blue pearls of light
in every direction.

I am called by many names.
As Nairatmya, I am the dark face of the Void
the waves upon the lightless ocean
I am the crow-headed goddess, flying high
my feathers in black, green, blue, and purple
I am the black goddess of death
holding the world in my arms
as I return to the deep waters
I am the mother who brings forth children from dark nothingness
who watches their lives and their deaths.

I am a wrathful emanation of Vajra Dakini,
she of rainbow crystal
Yet I am also her origin out of the dark void.
I dance with my bhairava
to the drumbeats of the heart of the universe
And from our dance come millions of whirling comets
Who form the guardians of the vajra worlds
When the dance is stopped, the comets return
And the universe is re-absorbed into our footsteps.

I create from the void and call things back to return
I tear apart form and attachment
My nails tear bonds to ribbons
which dance in the winds of prana
Those are my prayer-flags, and the banners of my warriors
They scatter the shreds of karma
before the winds of the Void
To create the dances of the worlds

I may be of help to the aspirant, but I am dangerous
For I will take away all he possesses
If he gives them up gladly,
we will dance together in their ashes
But if he clings to them
He will lose his mind and his heart.

I seek only beings ready for full liberation
Leave all behind and we will find beauty
In the emptiness that remains.

(95) The Charge of the Dark Goddess

2006-03-26T12:22:00.000+02:00

The Charge of the Dark Goddess

The Dark Goddess speaks to us,
through the mouths of Lilith, Kali, Tiamet, Hekate,
Nix, the Black Madonna, Nemesis and Morgaine..
I am the Darkness behind and beneath the shadows..
I am the absence of air that awaits at the bottom of every breath..
I am the Ending before Life begins again,
the Decay that fertilizes the Living..
I am the Bottomless Pit,
the never-ending struggle to reclaim that which is denied..
I am the Key that unlocks every Door..
I am the Glory of Discovery,
for I am that which is hidden, secluded and forbidden
Come to me at the Dark Moon and see that which can not be seen,
face the terror that is yours alone..
Swim to me through the blackest oceans
to the center of your greatest fears--
the Dark God and I will keep you safe..
Scream to us in terror, and yours will be the Power to Forbear..
Think of me when you feel pleasure, and I will intensify it,
until the time when I may have the greatest pleasure
of meeting you at the Crossroads Between the Worlds.

(94) The Dance of Raven and Eagle

2006-03-04T22:45:00.000+02:00

To go in the dark with a light
To go in the dark with a light
is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark.
Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too,
blooms and sings,
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
--Wendell Berry

America was founded on the vision of the Eagle. Flying high in the sky, with excellent eyesight and powerful wings, this bird has been seen as a symbol of strength, courage, independence, sovereignty, freedom and immortality for centuries. "The Eagle's fierce beauty and proud independence symbolizes the strength and freedom of America," said J. F. Kennedy. It is easy to see how the dominant culture of corporate power and political tyranny has thrived in a country that holds the symbol of this bird in its core values. Even those of us who consider ourselves more progressive and alternative are easy prey for this symbolism. We focus on the spirit, on evolution, getting over our "wounds" and becoming more efficient. I find myself sitting in weekly board meetings, where I squirm in my seat as a fellow board member shares a long-winded discourse, wanting him to "hurry up and get to the point." With the eye of the eagle, majority rules, and lets get on with the game.

The values of the quick, the efficient, the visionary and evolutionary, are deeply enmeshed in our ways of thinking. In a recent Time magazine article entitled "Visions 21: Our Work, Our World" authors made grand predictions for the future of jobs in America. They pointed to a world that would be largely automated, with many of the personal jobs disappearing altogether. This view is the continuation of Eagle dominance into the future. Pushing the past aside, we dive headlong into our future. We remain obsessed with the direction we are going, continually distracting ourselves with doing, acting, creating, manifesting. If TIME magazine is right, this future might look a bit bleak, like a tall tree with huge branches and no roots. We can all agree that the role of the eagle is fundamentally essential. At the same time, if we pause long enough to take a look (or a listen) we recognize that it is merely one half of the picture.

Even as we are moving at mock speed into the cyberspace world, are we not simultaneously emitting a silent cry for intimacy? I know for myself that when I call my long distance phone company and get a real live person on the other end without having to travel through a maze of voice-message connections, I breathe an audible sigh of relief. And at the end of that sometimes painfully long board meeting, when we sit, holding hands in silence, the love that transmits between those hands is very palpable. When I drive home after that, I invariably recognize that it's the love that keeps me coming back, and my urge towards efficiency is quickly forgotten.
This place in us is the home of the Raven, the home of the soul. The Raven is also a bird surrounded by great mythology and symbolism. Its jet-black color naturally associates it with night, the Void, with mystery and the Earth. It is a bird that has been granted great power in Native American myths: creating the manifest world, teaching through trickery, and being a messenger of the Void. In ancient Germanic cultures, the Raven was considered a symbol of sacrifice, and was associated with thought and memory. In the famous poem by E. A. Poe, the Raven, he calls this bird a prophet, and speaks to it with a mixture of awe and dread.

To honor the darkness of this bird's wing, we turn to our own hidden interior, the parts of our own past marked with shadows of unhealed wounds and unexpressed emotions. The Raven is the symbol of our own Soul. This is the side of ourselves that, according to Thomas Moore, is nostalgic, melancholy, lost in memories and dreams, rooted in the past, resisting change and seeking stability. The side of us that doesn't want to go to the meeting in the first place and would rather stay home and rest. The Raven symbolizes the home of our ancestors, our personal stories and body memories. It is distinctly earthy, and feminine. If I sit there and watch my fellow board members with the eye of the Raven, I realize the importance of letting each express their views, until we come to a place of completion, and consensus.

Now Im not proposing that we should sit at board meetings and discuss how we feel about what we each just ate for lunch. Or, for that matter, what is really at the root of the board member's long-winded monologue. But, perhaps, if we look further into the nature of our own human souls, we might find something more to balance the picture.

While we have been valuing the Eagle so strongly, what is it that has been suppressed? What is the voice that is so insistent in coming up, again and again, attempting to reveal itself to the light? What is the message the Raven brings to us from our own inner Void? In a dominant culture that values the Eagle, many of us have been raised in ways that have pushed us to get over our attachments, our fears and our feelings, and move on. Now we each go about our business, consciously or unconsciously attempting to express those suppressed voices. There he is, our friend and board member, repeating himself over and over again. Is it not so simple to see that the voice is seeking simple validation? An acknowledgement of the feelings so long suppressed? Again, not to turn the meeting into a therapy session, but I can recall several occasions when I was caught in a heated expressive moment, and completely "disarmed" by someone's simple words "I hear you." And I believe that turning that same listening ear inward, turning the vision of the eagle to the heart of the raven, can bring about our own relief. Our dark, feeling, attached and earthy side can find immeasurable relief by simply giving it attention. As much as our visionary side is passionately creating, our soulful side is yearning for stillness. Even this thought, can bring a wave of fear. Our fear is, again, that therapeutic torture chamber. Where our entire past lies revealed, naked on the floor, and we feel no better for it. No, the realm of the raven is the void, devoid of words, of images, of faces. The realm of the soul is the realm of the body. And, as the venerable Vipassana meditation teacher S. N. Goenka says, you don't have to know where the stains came from in order to wash the laundry. The quiet attention is the container; whatever arises, is simply observed. As we pause for stillness in our busy days, the rest happens on its own. The raven begins to fly.

And then, the eagle and raven come together. It is through the balancing of these two metaphors that the glory of the human heart is revealed. When we conduct our lives with the acute vision of the Eagle on one wing, and the deep understanding and self-knowing of the Raven on the other, we find ourselves flying in the body of a much bigger bird. Balanced between the Spirit and the Soul, the masculine and feminine, is the journey of the human heart. Here, we carry our vision, express our views, and then pause to listen, to others, to our relations, to the earth, to our own inner wisdom. Then again, we express, we pause, and we create. When we hold the vision of the eagle and the feeling of the raven with equal tenderness in our hands, a new being springs forth: the child of the future. One that can walk the information highways of cyberspace, yet remain rooted firmly with each foot planted on the ground, looking each passerby warmly in the eye. The majestic tree with deep, earth bound, succulent roots. Joyful, spiritual, rich, alive.
Interestingly enough, both eagle and raven were considered scavengers of the battlefield in Germanic lore, and were associated in pagan times with the God of Battle and the Lord of the Slain. They are considered twins in the Haidu legends, working together to bring balance between humans, the natural and supernatural worlds. It is in the realm of the dynamic dance between these two birds that we humans play. And as we move into the future, each of us is given this great gift, to honor the past, to envision the future, and to be fully present in the present moment.

H.Francis