I think this one wasn't quite what I was expecting when I picked it up. I was excited to learn what there might be to know about ravens, but this often feels as much or more like a book about the experience of studying ravens as about the birds themselves. Or even about the difficulty of studying ravens, since they are skittish, highly individual, extremely smart, frequently unpredictable, and often impossible for even experienced humans to tell apart. Still, the author has a lot of very interesting things to say about the birds, both tame and wild, that he spent time with, about his observations of their behavior and what it might mean, and, at the end of the book, also some speculative thoughts about what it means for an animal to be "conscious" and whether ravens qualify. I found it a bit dry in places, but surprisingly exciting in others, and ultimately well worth reading, as it does do a good job of conveying just why ravens are so cool, so fascinating, and still so mysterious.

Rating: I went back and forth on this a bit, but despite finding it a little bit of an uneven read, I think I'm going to have to give it 4/5. ( )

If only it was distilled into a lesser volume - just fascinating findings without those protracted descriptions of observation conditions and set up of experiments.

Originally published in 2007. I really would have enjoyed this book more if we had ravens in this area, in Southeast Texas, but, we don’t. They are mostly Yankee birds. Come to think of it, I’ve never even seen a crow out here on our ten acres, which is kind of in the country and surrounded by woods on two sides. Now why is that? Not enough food source? I have seen some crows in town in parking lots of malls and hospitals, but never even a crow around here.

I found parts of this book very interesting, and other parts kind of long, tedious and drawn out. This author’s research was focused more in a controlled environment, although he was able to study ravens pretty intensely out in the wild, too. He owned two aviaries, one in Vermont, and his main ½-acre aviary in Maine, where he captured, raised a few, and studied ravens throughout the 1990’s. Since science research progresses one tiny little step at a time, I’m sure his observations will add to the understanding of ravens and their behavior. And if you live where ravens live, you, at least, will now have more knowledge and understanding of what some of their calls and postures mean after reading this book.

I’m not sure how he ever managed to find time to get married and have children. The time it takes to feed and study these birds is incredible. I can’t imagine how often he had to go out hunting down dead carcasses and preparing them to be fed to his subjects day-in and day-out. Ravens eat an incredibly large amount of food, and feed about every two hours. Plus, the time to sit for hours upon hours in the freezing rain and snow just observing, or sitting inside his home and observing secretly through his bedroom window that opened up to the aviary, where he may have had up to 20 birds at any one time. Add the time he took to plan and prepare for activities to test their ability to be able to problem solve through a situation or not, and all the traveling he did to other countries just to observe ravens from another point of view. And keep in mind the fact that he had to keep a detailed log of the whole process on top of it all. And now, here is the book, detailing it all in just one volume…just for our pleasure. I wish we had ravens around here so I could observe them. ( )

As a professor of biology at The University of Vermont its understandable that the author of this book ; Bernd Heinrich would want to write a detailed, specific, and scientific account of the mind of ravens; and he does just that throughout the book. But as a lover and admirer of ravens he also waxes poetic about them again and again. Blending the science with the myth and lore of ravens could have been a really good idea for a book but unfortunately, for me, the author didn't quite pull it off. The science and the mythology always remained separate and their just wasn't a cohesiveness to the book that I felt it could have had. ( )

I don’t know what to think about this book. Would I have liked it more if I’d read the print version instead of listening to the audio? I don’t know, but I suspect … maybe.

Heinrich is a published scientist who studied ravens, so the book is pure behavioural science, no deviations, no asides; all very on-point and full of pure observational research and field studies. I have no complaints about this in theory – it was all very interesting and I can’t remember ever thinking it was getting dull or monotonous. Except that the narrator came very close to making it sound very dull and monotonous. This is why I suspect I’d have liked it more if I’d read it, or if there had a been a different narrator. Norman Dietz was competent; maybe even more than competent, as his delivery tried to be lively and was never wooden. But it was also obvious that he’s an older man, whose voice was often gravely and always a bit breathy, and in spite of his obvious efforts to bring the text alive, his voice still gave the narration a slight monotone that was hard to get past.

If I have any complaint about the content itself, it’s only that as a scientist, Heinrich is a bit cold-blooded. While it’s obvious he thoroughly enjoys his ravens and has no problem admitting to often having favorites, his objectivity and efforts to not anthropomorphise means that the ravens’ personalities never really come through. He doesn’t treat them as pets and they are, for the most part, semi-wild, but still, as someone who anthropomorphises everything, I’d have liked to have a better sense of they were as individuals.

I also struggled quite a bit at times with what Heinrich was willing to do in the name of science. While he always fed the ravens using roadkills (apparently ‘fresh’ is as relative a term to a raven as it is to vultures), there were a few studies he did where he blithely sacrificed untold numbers of animals to the ravens – while still alive – just to see how the ravens would react, and in one study he introduced a wild female raven to a tightly knit group of 4 ravens who had grown up together to see how they’d react, which wasn’t a positive experience for the poor caught raven. After a couple of days of witnessing her ostracism, Heinrich went out of town for a day and came back to find her dead from being basically pecked to death. He seemed surprised, but not remorseful, and the whole thing left a sour taste, as I’d have no problem arguing that that little experiment was not only unethical, but valueless from a scientific viewpoint.

Mostly, however, the information was interesting, if a little dated (most of his studies were done in the 90’s). ( )