Ravens at Play

Common ravens are our most intelligent birds – they cache food and move it if they’ve been observed in the process, can repeatedly pull on a string and hold it with a foot to retrieve food dangling from a perch, they use simple tools and they play. They’ve been observed carrying sticks as they fly, dropping the stick and catching it; dropping a rock for another raven to catch in the air; and playing similarly with streamers of surveyor’s plastic tape. While flying in a stiff wind they’ll do loop-the-loops and barrel rolls seemingly for the pure joy of it.

We went back to the farmland where we’d previously seen harriers and short-eared owls to try for better photos. That was not to be, because a northwest wind was howling across the ridges.

 

What we saw instead was a band of juvenile common ravens at play –

The ravens were playing in the wind, chasing each other, occasionally landing on a fencepost, and then resuming the chase –

After a while they apparently tired of the games, flew over us and out of sight.

For more about ravens’ intelligence see biologist Bernd Heinrich’s The Mind of the Raven.