Wolves & Ravens - January, 1983
Mar. 8th, 2008 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qosOnly a few folks are going to understand the significance of this, but it's important enough to me to capture here.
In the course of sorting through my files this afternoon, I found a paper I'd written for my Advanced Biology class during my senior year of high school. It was a major research paper (or what passed for one at that time) on wolves.
Why wolves? I can't remember now. Maybe we were supposed to do a paper on some kind of animal. Maybe the topic was open and this is what I chose. (Maybe Mr. T had suggested it?) I know that I didn't have any particular interest in wolves at that time.
The paper consists of 21 hand-written pages (plus illustrations and a small bibliography) still held firmly in a plastic binder. I paged through it, shaking my head slightly at the painstaking handwriting, the earnest juvenile scholarship. I didn't read much, but I did scan the last page. To my surprise, I found a description of a unique connection between wolves and ravens. I included a substantial quote from Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men:
The wolf apparently takes great pleasure in the company of ravens. The raven. . . commonly follows hunting wolves to feed on the remains of a kill. In winter, when tracks are visible from the air, ravens will follow the trail of a wolf pack in hopes of finding a carcass. They roost in neighboring trees or hop about eating bloody snow while the wolves eat, approaching the carcass when the wolves have finished. But the relationship between the two is deeper than this, as is revealed in the following incident. A travelling pack had stopped to rest and four or five ravens who were tagging along began to pester them. As Mech writes in The Wolf:
"The birds would dive at a wolf's head or tail and the wolf would duck and then leap at them. Sometimes the ravens chased the wolves, flying just above their heads, and once, a raven waddled to a resting wolf, pecked at its tail, and jumped aside as the wolf snapped at it. When the wolf retaliated by stalking the raven, the bird allowed it within a foot before arising. Then it landed a few feet beyond the wolf and repeated the prank.
"It appears that the wolf and the raven have reached an adjustment in their relationships such that each creature is rewarded in some way by the presence of the other, and each is fully aware of the other's capabilities. Both species are extremely social, so they must possess the psychological mechanisms necessary for forming social attachments. Perhaps in some way individuals of each species have included members of the other in their social group and formed bonds with them.
That was the end of my paper. There was no proper concluding paragraph, just this long quote about the unusal social relationship between wolves and ravens.
For some reason, when I was 18 years old, this caught my attention and merited special mention -- so much so that there didn't seem to be anything else left to say.
In the course of sorting through my files this afternoon, I found a paper I'd written for my Advanced Biology class during my senior year of high school. It was a major research paper (or what passed for one at that time) on wolves.
Why wolves? I can't remember now. Maybe we were supposed to do a paper on some kind of animal. Maybe the topic was open and this is what I chose. (Maybe Mr. T had suggested it?) I know that I didn't have any particular interest in wolves at that time.
The paper consists of 21 hand-written pages (plus illustrations and a small bibliography) still held firmly in a plastic binder. I paged through it, shaking my head slightly at the painstaking handwriting, the earnest juvenile scholarship. I didn't read much, but I did scan the last page. To my surprise, I found a description of a unique connection between wolves and ravens. I included a substantial quote from Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men:
The wolf apparently takes great pleasure in the company of ravens. The raven. . . commonly follows hunting wolves to feed on the remains of a kill. In winter, when tracks are visible from the air, ravens will follow the trail of a wolf pack in hopes of finding a carcass. They roost in neighboring trees or hop about eating bloody snow while the wolves eat, approaching the carcass when the wolves have finished. But the relationship between the two is deeper than this, as is revealed in the following incident. A travelling pack had stopped to rest and four or five ravens who were tagging along began to pester them. As Mech writes in The Wolf:
"The birds would dive at a wolf's head or tail and the wolf would duck and then leap at them. Sometimes the ravens chased the wolves, flying just above their heads, and once, a raven waddled to a resting wolf, pecked at its tail, and jumped aside as the wolf snapped at it. When the wolf retaliated by stalking the raven, the bird allowed it within a foot before arising. Then it landed a few feet beyond the wolf and repeated the prank.
"It appears that the wolf and the raven have reached an adjustment in their relationships such that each creature is rewarded in some way by the presence of the other, and each is fully aware of the other's capabilities. Both species are extremely social, so they must possess the psychological mechanisms necessary for forming social attachments. Perhaps in some way individuals of each species have included members of the other in their social group and formed bonds with them.
That was the end of my paper. There was no proper concluding paragraph, just this long quote about the unusal social relationship between wolves and ravens.
For some reason, when I was 18 years old, this caught my attention and merited special mention -- so much so that there didn't seem to be anything else left to say.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-09 03:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-09 09:05 pm (UTC)And I agree: it is nice to know that it's not just me!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-09 09:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-09 02:08 pm (UTC)