,
18 tweets,
5 min read
Read on Twitter
It’s Sunday, let’s learn some fun stuff. Here are 10 things you should know about ravens: 
1. Common ravens (Corvus corax) are the largest songbirds in the world. For a time people thought it was the thick-billed raven (Corvus crassirostris) but common ravens beat them out by a small margin.
2. Ravens are one of a small number of animals that show strong evidence of theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. Basically consciousness and empathy. A great exp on this showed they can imagine unseen competitors.
In a nutshell, the study showed that if ravens were given experience looking through a peephole, they could imagine that other birds might looking at /them/ through a peephole, even though they couldn’t see the other bird. google.com/amp/s/corvidre…
3. Like dogs and primates, hand raised ravens can track human gaze, even around objects! Peculiarly though, they don’t use human gaze to locate food.
So for example, if you had two overturned cups and one was hiding food and you stared at that one, they don’t choose to explore that cup more often then by chance. So why do they track our gaze?! We don’t know yet know. Long term world domination plans maybe.
4. Ravens live in very complex social groups where it pays to be high on the ladder. To prevent future rivals, some evidence suggests that socially bonded ravens will break up bonding attempts between budding alliances. Basically a divide and rule strategy corvidresearch.blog/2014/11/02/the…
5. Like parrots, ravens are life-long vocal learners, meaning they can learn new sounds, including human speech, at any point in their lives. By constrast many songbirds have a small window when they’re young to learn all the songs they’ll ever sing.
So could a raven come gently rapping at your chamber door quothing loudly “nevermore”? Heck. Yes. (But like parrots they really only pick up human speech in captivity)
6. Ravens don’t lead wolves to carcasses. Ravens follow wolves to kill sites and steal their food. It really pisses wolves off and they kill ravens when possible. In fact wolf pack size may be determined by theft pressure from ravens. isleroyalewolf.org/sites/default/…
7. Ravens do their own version of the screaming goat. These yells are the begging calls of young ravens. Unlike American crows, these youngsters will be kicked off the territory as soon as they reach independence and are not welcome back.
8. Ravens love to play, especially in the snow. They make snow balls and go sledding. They play at other times of the year too. Some of their other “hobbies” include using bark to windsurf.
9. Ice fishers know better than to leave their lines alone with ravens. Ravens are experts at the string-pull test, where they use sequential step-pull motions to reel up a prize. American crows can also do this, but they don’t seem catch on as quickly
10. In captivity ravens will, without training, cooperate to obtain a food reward. (Pic: Massen et al. 2015)
During these events ravens pay attention to whether their partner is selfish (eats all the food once they get it) or shares. They remember this, and if given a choice in the future will not work with selfish birds. nature.com/articles/srep1…
Furthermore they notice when they are getting a worse reward for doing the same work as another bird, and will stop working. journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…
So to summarize: ravens are big playful, politically scheming songbirds that make weird sounds, pick on wolves, are pro-union and are 100% watching you and waiting to steal your lunch. Follow me for more corvid content!
Well goodness, I knew ya’ll liked ravens but I wasn’t expecting this. Your enthusiasm has officially surpassed my ability to keep up. If you have a burning question please hold off for a day before tweeting it otherwise I’m not likely to see it. And same for RT’ing ones I missed.
