Cache and carry

All corvids cache or hide things. Ravens cache some food for later. The raven's expandable throat is the perfect carrier for their treats. Caching requires  a good memory, a spatial awareness. They also are clever or one might say, devious in their caching. I have seen Grog burying some food in the sand, marking it carefully with a stick or broken shell while Sunshine looked on. When he flew off, she went to the exact spot, turned over the sand and nothing was there. Almost invariably, there is a double cache.

I guess theft is common but the ravens definitely have the seagulls licked. One day I saw Grog casually walk up to a seagull who had just caught a fish in the surf. Grog took the fish right from the shocked seagull's mouth and walked away with it. After eating some, he flew with a full throat pouch to the cliffs to cache. The fish might have ended up in the palm trees. There are some near Grog and Sunshine's nest and the pair seem to find the base of the palm leaves, where they attach to the stem, much to their liking for a hiding or an apparent hiding place.

Ravens learn early to be aware of other vigilant eyes and to anticipate their fellow cachers. Perhaps they take pleasure in tricking each other or just keeping the other on his claws as it were. I have watched young ravens practicing caching with debris on the beach. The watchful eyes of their fellow fledglings make for a perfect school. Of course, they first learn by watching their parents even though to 'cache and carry' seems almost innate.

Esther Woolfson, in her elegantly written and deeply felt book, Corvus, describes her resident rook, Chicken's, caching behavior as not just natural but artistic and obsessive. She tells us that if the food is a particular favorite of Chicken's, (in this case she mentioned goat cheese) she will wrap it first in paper, unwrap it, wrap it again, cache it, retrieve it and cache it again, enjoying it obsessively throughout the day, tasting it bit by bit. Chicken's piece de resistance for caching is her excavation, inch by inch, over the years of part of the author's kitchen wall above the skirting board.

I haven't been able to detect quite such artistry from my wild raven friends unless the chiseling with their beaks into the cliffside to cache is the beginning of a monumental sculpture. The act of saving--an art, I wonder?