Natural history notes

[bunrab]

	lj book reviews
	In the Company of Crows and Ravens John M. Marzluff what are you reading?.
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Fascinating book. Let's see: corvids' stout, all-purpose bills are often compared to Swiss Army knives because they can cut, tear, crush, gape, probe, rip, and open just about anything. Illustrations of corvid skulls, next to other birds, to show how much larger their brain-case is than most birds. Lots of lovely drawings - although many of the ones meant to show the differences between the various species look exactly the same to me. Note: "crows" includes crows, ravens, jackdaws, and rooks (all the same genus, 46 species); "corvids" includes all those plus magpies, jays, and nutcrackers (all the same family).
Longevity: Common ravens have lived 13 years in the wild, and forty to eighty (!) years in captivity. Raven roosts vary in size from fifty to two thousand birds each night. American crows roost in groups of up to two million. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher once quipped, "If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows." Some crows have started playing a game involving a tennis net and old tennis balls left on the court, after observing humans playing tennis. This observation is part of a greater point that the authors are making, which is that crows have culture, perhaps even more so than most of the great apes, up at the level of dolphins and whales - dialects and regional accents of crow calls, lots of learned behavior transmitted to the young by teachers, and other signs that distinguish culture from nature.
The authors discuss the influence of crows on human culture: the importance of crows in mythologies from around the world, the association of crows with death (although, disappointingly, they completely neglect to mention the beautiful song "The Three Ravens" and its vulgar cousin, "The Twa Corbies"), how humans' recognition of the differences between crows' intelligence and domesticated animals' intelligence has helped us define the concept of "domesticated" and so on.
Did you know that the cave paintings of Lascaux include birds that are clearly crows or ravens?

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It's odd; although I read a lot of books on subjects in biology/natural history, I don't seem to have reviewed many of them. If you want to take a look at the ones I have reviewed on amazon.com, here they are:
Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger
How to Attract the Wombat (note: this one is really humor - but it *is* also accurate natural history, as far as it goes. In any event, it's one of my favorite books ever.)
Astonishing Animals: Extraordinary Creatures and the Fantastic Worlds They Inhabit
Rats, Lice, and History
Evolution of Sickness and Healing

(And, as usual, feel free to click the little buttons under my reviews!)