Black Bird Bias

A Songbird, a raven

(click on photo to see clearly)

There seems to be a prejudice out there against corvids, that these songbirds kill the smaller songbirds in gardens. Corvids do eat young birds but cats kill more. A professor at Cornell, Kevin McGowan, has a theory he calls 'compensatory mortality' which states that if one predator doesn't kill the songbird's young, another will. Most young birds die in their first year through one cause or another. The greater threat to garden bird numbers though is human encroachment into their habitats, all of our building, our pesticides and consequent climate change are the greater evil.

These black corvids are wild, also struggling to survive. Hawks, coyotes, snakes take their young. Corvids have a history of human persecution. They were associated with the black death and the plague in medieval times. They were hated and hunted but they have adapted. They are survivors. They eat the roadkill and the garbage we leave behind.

As spelled out so thoroughly in Marzluff and Angell's In the Company of Crows and Ravens, the interaction between man and corvids goes back to the cave dwellers who carved their images on the walls of their caves. Genetic evidence makes a case for ravens having been in North America for over four million years, well before humans. The authors believe the most important interaction between men and ravens was when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers.

When Siberian hunter-gatherers crossed the land bridge to North America ten thousands of years ago, the clever raven joined with him, perhaps leading the hunter to the kill and then taking some share of the booty. The authors suggest that it was the larger corvids who flew the Bering Land Bridge from Asia, leading the smaller songbirds to the Americas.

With the onset of agrarian society, crows adapted to the conversion of forests to fields better than ravens. Of course, the crows ate much of the corn and became an infamous pest to be hunted and annihilated. In the thirties and forties, some states particularly in the midwest, designated crows as vermin and dynamited crow roosts, killing hundreds of thousands. Even today, they are still hunted for fun or sport. Likewise in Europe, ravens were persecuted for centuries and are rare.

Ravens are known for their interaction with wolves and are sometimes called wolf-birds. With the re-introduction of wolves into Yellowstone, the ravens are back with the wolves in what appears to be a symbiotic relationship, a raven calling the wolf's attention to prey, the wolf doing the killing for both. As mentioned above, early man had a similar relationship with the ravens as wolves do. In many native American cultures, corvids are held highly, worshipped as sacred whereas the Euro-American culture made their black image negative, one of death and destruction.

Like most people, I also love the smaller songbirds. In my tiny garden, I follow the wren, the hummingbird, the finch and the yellow throat, different warblers. If I see a nest search going on, I try to scare off the bigger hungry relatives. Yet, it is all nature, their interference and mine. According to the poet, Wallace Stevens, there are at least "Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird." Like him, "I know the blackbird is involved in what I know."