Nunani: Feathered friend, feathered foe (Part one)

“And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming…”
– Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven

The Japanese have a culture-hero named Yoshitsune. He is the hero of a mythologized era when Japan was in the throes of civil war. Most folklorists think that Yoshitsune’s era was around the 12th century, when Japan indeed was at war, but so long ago that its events have mingled with myth and folklore over time.

The story of Yoshitsune is long, but in one small part of it, Yoshitsune finds himself in the mountains. There, he encounters strange creatures known as “tengu.” These are crow-men – their torsos are humanoid, but they have crow feet, talons, black feathers, little crow wings growing out of their backs and entire crow heads.

The tengu are the repositories of much wisdom alien to mankind, but they accept Yoshitsune as their pupil. Because they agree with his noble destiny, they do him the favour of training him. They teach him the secret martial art of the sword, “kenjutsu.” After Yoshitsune finally leaves them, he gathers his own warriors together and teaches them this tengu knowledge. Thus, it is said that the most important skill of the samurai warrior class – the art of fencing – is the gift of these crow-men to warring humanity.

On Aug. 8, 2002, the BBC online world edition displayed a peculiar story – the startling observations of a team of British zoologists at Oxford University. These observations concerned a crow named Betty. Betty had been presented with a problem. Her food was placed in a container, a sort of miniature bucket, complete with handle. This container was in turn placed in a clear tube. The food-container sat at the bottom of the tube, out of range of her beak.

What did Betty do? She took a piece of straight wire (which she acquired from a male bird named Abel, incidentally) and bent the wire into a hook. This she used, held in her beak, to lift the food-container out of the tube. In subsequent tests, she did this over and over again, even though she had never been taught how to make a hook before. In other words, she had exercised creativity. She had thought of it on her own.
Most people would readily admit that this is pretty clever for a bird, especially since many young children would never think to retrieve an object by fashioning a hook.

But Betty’s ingenuity really shines when we consider what the Oxford researchers pointed out. This is what really made her behaviour so special: it is the first time that a non-human creature has been observed to solve a problem by fashioning a new tool for itself from scratch. Even our closest non-human relative, the chimpanzee, has never been observed do this.

In the countless tests done with chimps over the decades, they have exhibited tool use many times, but no animal has ever actually made a new tool to suit a unique problem. Betty is a first. In other words, the simple crow has finally proven to the clinical world that it is not so simple.

This probably wouldn’t surprise a lot of old Inuit hunters. Inuit folklore agrees with the Japanese that the crow or raven (same thing for our purposes) has always been the thinker, the trouble-maker, the cunning one – sometimes the saviour.

Crows and ravens, along with their distant cousins, the jays, are all corvids, from the Latin corvus, which just means “crow.” The corvids all seem to have mixed measures of boldness and cleverness in common, which makes me recall that, when I was growing up, Inuit always thought of ravens as the best sort of bird pets. They were those rare animals that were considered to possess “isuma” (human-like awareness), which made them good companions. And it also helped that they were able to eat just about anything.

Like much of the rest of the world, Inuit seem to have mixed reactions to corvids – or more specifically, ravens. Just as the raven fades from a lighter, more admirable cast, to a darker, diabolical cast as we look from place to place across Europe, so it does the same as we look east to west across the Arctic.

(Continued next week.)