“Ravens taught me to pay attention. The desert taught me to see. Art and artists taught me to see more … and better … and to appreciate, savor, and protect.” — Linda Durham

Ravens are members of the family Corvidae, a family that includes Clark’s nutcrackers, jays, crows, magpies, choughs, jackdaws, and rooks (the last three being European corvids.)

Currently there is one nutcracker, 10 jays, two magpies, three crows and two raven species native to North America. Among birds, among all non-human animals, corvids rank especially high in their ability to solve novel problems. Given a set of seemingly unrelated items, ravens and crows (their slightly diminutive cousins) are able to use those items in a multiple step process as tools to access food. As another indication of intelligence, ravens play. I have watched small groups of ravens, possibly families, pick up objects (in one case it was an apple) and then repeatedly try to drop them on each other while performing aerial acrobatics.

Ravens are sometimes associated with death and darkness. Edgar Allan Poe used the raven in the poem to symbolize the speaker's overwhelming grief. In Poe’s 18-stanza poem, “The Raven,” the line, “Quoth the Raven, Nevermore," is repeated throughout the poem. In Greek mythology, ravens are associated with Apollo, the God of prophecy. They are said to be a symbol of bad luck and were the gods’ messengers in the mortal world. In the Book of Genesis, Noah releases a raven from the ark after the great flood to test whether the waters have receded. Philo of Alexandria (first century AD) interpreted the Bible allegorically, identifying Noah’s raven as a symbol of vice, whereas the dove was a symbol of virtue. Odin, a widely revered god in Germanic paganism, was often associated with ravens. Depictions of figures often identified as Odin appear flanked with two birds on a 6th-century gold jewelry plate and on a 7th-century helmet plate from Sweden. In later Norse mythology, Odin is depicted as having a pair of ravens, Huginn and Muninn, serving as his eyes and ears – huginn meaning "thought" and muninn meaning "memory." The raven also has a prominent role in the mythologies of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest of North America, including Tsimishians, Haidas, Heiltsuks, Tlingits, Kwakwaka'wakw, Coast Salish, Koyukons, and Inuit. The raven in these indigenous peoples' mythology is the Creator of the world, but is also considered a trickster God.

Clearly, over the span of human culture and history, ravens have played an important if not mixed role in our culture and how we view them as symbols of either good or evil, mischievousness or honor, death, or creation. Today that mixed image of ravens is still present.

Ravens occur around the world, from cold polar regions to deserts, often becoming more common when those regions are altered by humans.  As such, arguably more than any other species, they are the epitome of adaptability. That adaptability makes them survivors across habitats, climates, and time. Until perhaps the past century ravens were uncommon desert residents. Nineteenth century naturalists exploring our deserts recorded ravens maybe once or twice a week.

Today we can see dozens, sometimes hundreds in a day. The difference is how we have changed the desert. By crisscrossing the desert with roads, we have both fragmented habitats and have created killing zones where creatures trying to reach the other side of the road are stopped by vehicles racing to get to their destinations. Ravens are there to clean up the carnage. We are also a wasteful species, creating huge landfills to bury what we didn’t consume in time before it spoiled. Ravens are there to help clean up those spoils. We can all do better by tortoises and ravens if we control our waste, especially when camping or visiting natural areas in tortoise habitat. Ravens build stick nests to raise their young. In past centuries that would mean ravens would have been restricted to areas with steep cliffs or large trees (including Joshua trees and palm trees). Because owls typically do not build nests, they often appropriate previously used raven nests to raise their brood. In a very real way ravens enabled great horned, long eared, and barn owls to enter and thrive in desert habitats. Now ravens also use high megawatt power towers to build their nests on, allowing both ravens to expand into desert regions otherwise bereft of cliffs or trees.

Ravens will eat just about anything organic, but in a landscape without roads or wasteful humans, the top items on their menu were likely insects. We have seen flocks of up to a hundred or more ravens descend upon hordes of sphinx moth caterpillars, rendering the horde to just a few survivors. What that meant is that hundreds of annual plants and their pollinators thrived that would otherwise have become food for the caterpillars. As omnivores, ravens will also eat lizards and even baby tortoises. I have traced the raven tracks walking across sand dunes, doing exactly what I do when surveying fringe-toed and flat-tailed horned lizards. Except the ravens were looking for food, and more than once I have seen them carrying a lizard off the dunes.

Some ravens have become experts at finding and eating baby tortoises. One raven nest had 136 baby tortoise corpses on the ground below it. As tortoise numbers have declined dramatically over the past few decades, wildlife managers are searching for anything to stem the tortoise decline. One of those “solutions” has been to persecute ravens. Marksmen have been hired to “remove” ravens from tortoise protection areas, raven nests have been destroyed or the eggs been oiled to keep the embryos inside from being able to respire through pores in the eggshells. Desperate times can require desperate measures, and the ravens have once again been demonized. But are the ravens at fault, or are they simply responding to how humans have changed our desert (ours and the ravens’ and the tortoises’ desert)?

Killing ravens and preventing them from nesting successfully seem like simple solutions, but so far, I have not heard of any change in the declining tortoise population trajectories. Other sources of tortoise mortality include being hit by cars on highways, respiratory diseases, invasive grasses and mustards pushing out the native wildflowers the tortoises need for food, and the “gorilla” in the room – climate change. Climate change is increasing high temperatures and increasing drought frequency, together reducing available tortoise food and water to drink. Reducing highway speed limits, fencing highways to reduce all wildlife mortalities, controlling invasive plant species, and reversing climate change will all be hard and expensive. Demonizing ravens is comparatively easy and cheap. Whether it is effective or not has yet to be determined.

Another solution could be to “head start” baby tortoises, keeping them protected in captivity until their shells are hard enough to withstand raven pecks. Adult tortoises live many decades. When sufficient food is available female tortoises typically lay 4-12 eggs per year, and over a lifetime could easily lay 100-400 eggs or more. Of those hatchlings, only two need to survive to maintain a stable tortoise population (replacing the mother and the father); any more than that would result in a growing tortoise population. However, those young tortoises will need to live in a world relatively free of invasive grasses, with a climate that suits them and their food plants. To me, those are the real demons to address.

Nullius in verba 

Go outside, tip your hat to a chuckwalla (and a cactus), think like a mountain, and be safe.