The “ums,” the “ahs” and the throating-clearing. It makes for a sometimes halting speaking style when you realize the name of the bird species you are talking about is MIA. Because it’s embarrassing when you don’t, and sometimes, sad to say, WC doesn’t. So it was with distinctly mixed feelings that WC attended a lecture Wednesday night by Heinrich as a part of Boise State University’s “The Idea of Nature” lecture series.Īs WC has gotten older, he sometimes finds himself, while talking, scouting ahead in his mind to make sure he remembers all the names of whatever he is talking about.

To learn about ravens, try the real stuff. There is a real science of the Corvids, the family of birds of which the Common Raven is a member. And to see one on a streetlight at -50, a dim shape in the ice fog, is to understand a part of what makes both ravens and Alaska special.īut as much as I love ravens, this book does little to help me or anyone else understand them. The incredible range of sounds they can make approaches the uncanny.

Those that have habituated to cities prefer dumpsters behind fast food restaurants over any other kind, MacDonalds best of all. They are clever, adaptable and resilient animals. I live in interior Alaska and ravens are a part of the environment. Where his first book, _Ravens in Winter_, was a specific study of a specific problem, this books describes a series of lame experiments, a sort of “seat of the pants” approach to biology. It’s not even natural history, since most of the behavior he views is the result of his own, contrived experiments. Here’s WC’s Amazon September 2000 review of Heinrich’s The Mind of the Raven, his followup to the very good Ravens in Winter:Ī better title might be Fooling Around with Ravens or All My Raven Experiments That Went Wrong, or, perhaps, Why A Scientist Must Be Smarter Than His Subject. He’s also the author of some twenty popularizations, of wildly uneven quality. He’s now an emeritus professor at the University of Vermont and, at 80 years old, still runs ultra marathons.

The Birds of North America note on Common Ravens cites to him an amazing eighteen times. Bernd Heinrich at Boise State University, April 17, 2019īernd Heinrich is a highly regarded biologist.

Bernd heinrich raven