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August 1, 1999

Bird Brains
Just how smart are ravens, anyway? The biologist Bernd Heinrich went to
great pains to find out.
By DAVID QUAMMEN

orse legend tells that Odin, lord of the gods, was

attended by two ravens, named Hugin (Thought) and
Munin (Memory), who served him as reconnaissance
agents, returning after each long, snoopy flight to perch on
his shoulders and whisper into his ears. The story reflects a
widespread belief, spanning cultures and centuries, that
ravens possess uncanny intelligence. By actual measurement MIND OF THE RAVEN
they are the brainiest of birds, and on subjective evidence Investigations and
they seem more sapient than most other living creatures. Adventures With Wolf-
According to Thucydides, ravens were too smart to feed on Birds.
By Bernd Heinrich.
the carcasses of animals that died from plague. According to Illustrated. 380 pp. New
Eskimo cosmogony, the god Raven made all things, creating York:
light out of mica flakes and humans out of rock. The Roman Cliff Street Books/
naturalist Pliny described a raven bright enough to exploit HarperCollins Publishers.
the physics of volume displacement, dropping pebbles into a $25.
narrow-neck vase until the water level came up within reach
for a drink. Other anecdotal accounts likewise portray ravens
using tools, foresight, visualization, high analytical skills.
Furthermore, they're famously mischievous. Ravens steal,
deceive, clown around acrobatically, mimic human speech
and play pranks on dogs. Everyone who spends time in the wild north, it seems, has a
raven story.
In his earlier book ''Ravens in Winter,'' the biologist Bernd Heinrich acknowledged this
reverential buzz but put his scientific skepticism on record. Notwithstanding the
consensus, he wrote, ''a review of the literature convinces me that no proof of the raven's
singular intelligence has yet been published.'' That absence of proof, plus his own
affection for the common raven, Corvus corax, has incited him to the long course of field
study and experiments described in ''Mind of the Raven.'' Why did this enterprise seem so
compelling? Why plumb the intelligence of a big black bird that lives in cold places and
happens also to be famous for feeding on carcasses? Because, as Heinrich nicely says,
''the poetry of biology resides hidden in opposing tensions, and the often arduous fun
comes from trying to reveal it.''
Bernd Heinrich is no ordinary biologist. He's the sort who combines formidable scientific
rigor with a sense of irony and an unslaked, boyish enthusiasm for his subject, and who
even at his current professorial age seems to do a lot of tree climbing in the line of
research. ''I spent one winter getting up every day hours before dawn to climb tall spruce
trees near baits I had put out,'' he reports in the new book. His baits were calf carcasses
and other meaty offerings. ''Aside from the pure enjoyment of climbing snowy trees in the
dark at subzero temperatures, I did it to count birds.'' He has a rare ability to embed dense
scientific explications within graceful, light-footed nature writing, as in ''Bumblebee
Economics,'' his little 1979 classic on the energetics and foraging strategies of
bumblebees.
Whether he's studying bees, ravens or African dung beetles, he maintains a strong sense
of the ecological fundamentals, asks good questions and complements his field
observations with a manic experimentalism. One day he hoists a calf carcass into a tree,
seeking clues about why ravens sometimes seem wary of food on the ground; on another
he puts on a ghoulish Halloween mask, testing his hand-reared ravens' powers of visual
recognition (and, no doubt, their patience); still another time he designs a think-and-do
challenge using hard salami and a long piece of string. Some of his raven experiments are
so sportive, in fact, that they bring to mind the elderly Charles Darwin, in his study,
playing the piano to a potful of earthworms and watching them for auditory sensitivity.
Who cares whether a passing acquaintance might conclude that the old boy's gone
insane? Who cares whether a given experiment yields answers, ambiguity or only a useful
new question? That's the Heinrichian spirit of inquiry.
''Mind of the Raven'' is an amiable, disorderly book that for all its charm often seems too
directly derived from field notes and daily journal entries of the working scientist. Some
of the minute-by-minute detail is engaging, some presents meaningful data and some is
just noise. Occasionally Heinrich spends two or three pages building toward what
promises to be a narrative climax, then instead comes to a dissipated fizzle: This bird flew
over there, two more flew back, one sat, the afternoon grew chilly, Heinrich waited,
nothing, he went home, never mind, oh but he tried again a week later, and on that
day . . . uh, still nothing. Although he does have a gift for lyric description, Heinrich isn't
a born storyteller, and it's too bad his hard-earned field notes haven't been more
stringently selected and shaped.
What he wants to know about ravens, most essentially, is whether they merely learn
useful tricks by happenstance and then remember them or whether they consciously
analyze and solve problems: do they embody the mental capacities of both Odin's Hugin
and Munin, thought and memory, or of Munin alone? He touches such topics as their
social relationships, their sharing behavior, their vocal repertory, their ability to recognize
one another as individuals, their fears, their playfulness and what might be considered
their code of morality. He describes research journeys to Germany, Yellowstone National
Park and a remote village on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, where an old man tells
him of the collusive relationship that once prevailed between ravens and hunters. The
ravens would fly along with hunting parties and make a wing-dipping move to signal the
hunters toward caribou, so that the hunt would be successful and everyone, humans and
birds, would tuck into a bounteous feast.
Can that folklorish belief be credited? Heinrich wonders. At a wolf research center in
Nova Scotia, he learns by experiment that ravens prefer to feed in the presence of wolves
rather than solitarily. The wolfish company puts them at ease. When Heinrich sees that
pattern repeated in Yellowstone, he begins thinking of ravens as ''wolf-birds,'' commensal
partners of the pack-hunting carnivores upon whom they depend for part of their diet. The
same sort of bond, he speculates, may have anciently connected human hunting bands and
ravens -- bird and primate feasting companionably over the carcasses of Pleistocene
mammoths. ''Ravens are the quintessential northern bird. It is no accident that they are
also the bird most closely associated with humans in the culture and folklore of northern
people,'' he writes. From the companionship of a successful hunt and a shared feast, it
would have been only a short hop to Odin's shoulder.
Small facts seem to excite Heinrich as much as large ideas, and sometimes they glitter
prettily for the reader too. His pursuit and handling of such data -- as a scientist and as an
author -- are perhaps best reflected in the episode of the doughnuts.
It began with a hearsay report that an oil pipeline worker in Alaska had tossed two
doughnuts to a pestering raven, curious to see whether that windfall would confuse the
bird. Rather than gorging on a single doughnut, or taking one away to cache while leaving
the other at risk, the raven had stuck its bill through the first doughnut's hole, grasped the
second with its bill tip and flown away with both. The oil worker was impressed.
Heinrich was fascinated. Did the peekaboo doughnut grab constitute analytic problem-
solving? Could it be replicated by any of the hand-reared ravens at his field camp in
western Maine? Four pages are devoted to this investigation, which involved multiple
tries using doughnuts from a local bakery. A raven named Fuzz did manage to carry two
doughnuts at once, one serving as a basket for the other, though none of his birds hit upon
the peekaboo grab. ''Maine ravens obviously knew how to hold their doughnuts,''
Heinrich writes, making a slippery capitulation, ''but if they seemed a little more
idiosyncratic or creative than the Alaskan raven, it was probably because the Alaskan
pipeline workers eat bigger doughnuts than those from the Koffee Kup Bakery.''
Elsewhere he concedes that raven intelligence, though seemingly manifest, is hard to
prove.
Still, inconclusive results are no disaster, so long as the questions are worthy, the animals
remain interesting and the scientist himself has an unquenchable sense of fun. It's lucky
for Heinrich, and for the rest of us, that he shifted to field biology after an early
professional focus on cell physiology. This man wasn't cut out for squinting through a
microscope. The mind of Bernd Heinrich is a big, antic thing, like a raven, and meant to
live outdoors.

David Quammen, the author of ''The Song of the Dodo,'' is working on a book about the
idea of leviathan.
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