Ravin’ about them crows

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/08/2009 (6144 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When I was kid, we had a parakeet for a pet. It was cute and I hated it. It died, and the family went back to having cats for companions.

Now my family has a dog, a small poodle who is perhaps the dumbest dog that has ever lived since dogs were domesticated. He routinely bites me, but I have a certain affection for him.

Recently, my youngest daughter, Katie, has begun trying to domesticate her mother, my wife, who tends to get cranky more than occasionally. “Mom doesn’t play well with others,” she says, and Mother has been instructed by Katie to say this out loud whenever she acts up, which is frequently.

The domestication of birds, cats, dogs and mothers is a good thing if you plan to keep them in your house. The parakeets, Persian cats and poodles probably couldn’t survive on their own anymore — their entire existence depends on people — and the animal rights activists who argue that keeping a pet is somehow an abusive act akin to clubbing a baby seal don’t understand anything about history, evolution or the animals they claim to defend. If we set all the cows free, they would be dead before spring.

Mothers and wives, on the other hand, can survive almost anywhere, endure any circumstances as long as they have someone to order around. They may not play well with others, but they get by.

Mothers and wives, in fact, are kind of like crows, and I mean that in the best way possible. Crows are my favourite birds. Well, actually, ravens are my favourite birds, but you don’t see a lot of ravens in Winnipeg. They do, however, have deep roots in Norse mythology.

The Norse god Odin had two ravens. One was named Hugginn, whose name translates as “Thought,” and the other called Muninn, which means “Memory.” Every day the two birds would travel the world and return to whisper in Odin’s ear the news of all that was happening. Except for the whispering part, they were a lot like wives and mothers, in that way.

Whispering ravens may be scarce in Winnipeg — actually, in real life, ravens don’t whisper at all, they make more noise than the crows that are so common here. You can see crows everywhere around the city and they are definitely self-asserting. A crow’s caw is unmistakable, not unlike the voice of someone who doesn’t play well with others.

But crows are remarkable birds. It has long been known that they are attractive and smart, that they are survivors, and that they are everywhere. You can find them all around the world and are one of the few birds that can survive a Winnipeg winter.

They are, according to studies, smarter even than dogs. They learn more quickly, they learn spontaneously where dogs more often need to be trained. An old wives’ tale tells us that if you split a crow’s tongue, it will be able to speak, but that’s not true, it seems, and it would be a pretty brave old wife who would try to do that — crows are formidable birds.

A new study by researchers at Oxford University indicates that crows are even smarter than we thought. Crows in captivity in New Caledonia spontaneously figured out how to use tools to accomplish a task — they used three straws of different lengths in the right order to get at a bit of food. No other animal has ever done this without specific training for it.

Other animals use tools, even fashion tools, to do things, but the crows used tools to make and use other tools, which is unique.

As a story in the Free Press pointed out this week, this gives an entirely different meaning to the term “bird-brain.” It is also a little humbling, because as attractive as crows are, bird-wise, it is not so flattering to know that on an intelligence scale, we are just a budge above a bird-brain.

Crows and ravens are closely related, kind of like thought and memory. Icelandic literature tells us that Odin worried about his ravens as they flew over Midgard, or the Earth as we know it today: “I fear that ‘Thought’ may not wing his way home, but my fear for ‘Memory’ is greater.”

Odin was known as the All-Wise and his fears were wisely apportioned because without memory, there are no tools to use for thought, even if you are a crow.

So the next time you see a crow or a raven, which will be soon, say good morning. If her tongue is split, she might answer back “Hey, big fella, how’s it going?” which is more pleasantry than you are likely to get from all those people you know who don’t play well with others.

tom.oleson@freepress.mb.ca