Living with the Trickster: Crows, Ravens, and Human Culture

F ew groups of wild animals inspire such extreme opinions in the humans who observe them than members of the genus Corvus. In the book In the Company of Crows and Ravens [1], John Marzluff and Tony Angell quote Reverend Henry Ward Beecher's admiring words, " If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows " (page 80 in [1]), but they also recount the opinion of their neighbour who sees crows as noisy, destructive, dirty, aggressive, and clever. Cleverness, it seems, is the only corvine attribute on which people agree. People are rarely indifferent to crows, and this book explores the changes in opinion throughout our history of interactions with them. The authors argue—quite persuasively— that as well as affecting the biology and cultural evolution of crows, this relationship has had a signifi cant infl uence on our own cultural evolution. They even suggest that there are instances of cultural coevolution between humans and crows. Perhaps such an intertwined history to some extent explains our strong feelings about crows. The book covers an enormous amount of ground, documenting in an engaging way both the current research on ecology, social behaviour, and cognitive and communicative abilities of crows and their diverse representations in our legends, art, literature, and spiritual rituals. Consider the similarities between humans and crows: we are both highly social species, living mainly in small family groups but assembling in much larger numbers around rich resources. We are both intelligent, and adapt relatively easily to changes in environmental conditions. We are both generalists and opportunists about food, and can exploit a huge variety of resources. These similarities mean that for a large proportion of human history, crows have been a ubiquitous and prominent part of our world. Our early interactions with crows (particularly ravens) seem to have resulted in a generally respectful—even awed—attitude towards them. Inuit legends describe how Crow brought light to the far north for his people, and the Norse god Odin was informed about the world by his two ravens, Hugin and Munin (Thought and Memory). Certainly, representing the thought and memory of a god would seem to be a fairly prestigious position. However, when humans became largely agrarian, crows became our competitors—stealing food and raiding crops—and had to be scared off with " scarecrows. " Later still, crows came to be associated with disease and …