The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

by Jennifer Ackerman

Doing science with ravens, on the other hand, is easy. “They’re so inquisitive and engaged,” says Osvath. “If they find that a task is interesting enough, they’ll line up to participate. They’re fun to study, and they make me laugh.” They’re also as knotty and contradictory as any character from Shakespeare. They’re highly intellectual birds, yet often silly in their antics. They have a strict, rigid social hierarchy and pecking order maintained through conflicts and fighting—they form coalitions and beat up on one another—and yet they continue to frolic together well into adulthood. They love to noodle around with objects yet seem deathly afraid of them—at least when they’re new. “If you put a chair in the aviary, for example,” says Osvath, “the birds will sit and look at it for two weeks. And then, all of a sudden, they’ll go for it, and it will take them like five minutes to completely dismember it. You never know what will scare them. You can think, ‘Oh, when I bring in this new experimental device, they’ll just freak out. But they don’t. And then one day when you walk into the aviary, they completely lose it, and you can’t understand what the problem is, until you realize, ‘Oh, I’m wearing new gloves.’