A Bird With A Brain

Jim's encounters with the raven in several northern countries have only increased his respect for its intellect and ingenuity

IT wasn't God who made the world, but raven." A tribal elder in Alaska told me that. Then, by way of demonstrating the wisdom of that belief, he added, "Raven's first task was to create nature in perfect balance. So he made the bald eagle, with a white head, a black body and a white tail to signify nature in perfect balance."

Two days later, somewhere far up the Yukon near the Alaska-Canada border, a Canadian university biologist told me about a study by one of his colleagues which concluded that the raven had a more extensive vocabulary than any other creature, apart from people.

The colleague studied a group of ravens and noticed that each bird had one sound which was unique, a sound no other bird used. But when one of the group was killed, all the ravens of the group started to look for it and all of them called out using the dead bird's unique name.

"You mean like a search party?" I had asked.

He nodded emphatically. "Exactly like it," he said. Ravens are smart.

In Iceland, I found a raven nest and answered a question I had been asking myself for several days, days liberally dosed with ravens but devoid of trees: how does a raven build a nest in a landscape of no trees, and therefore no source of twigs?

Until my moment of discovery, I had only ever seen raven nests made with twigs. The Icelandic nest I found was set on the window ledge of a very old barn. The structure was made from scraps of an old barbed wire fence, softened within by a sumptuous depth of sheep's wool. Ravens are smart.

In Norway, they were once borderline royalty. Norway's copious mythology includes the ravens Hugin and Munin who sat on the shoulders of Odin - God of Knowledge among other things- and one represented memory and the other represented thought.

I worked for a few days with two Norwegians named Bjorn and Gaire who often relied on the intelligence of ravens to help them find wolves.