3rd book of 2020.
Sometimes I wonder if every topic is interesting when the right level of curiosity is brought to bear. Bernd Heinrich makes Ravens, and just about anything related to the forests of Maine interesting. In fact, Berndt could have written a book about paint drying and I would still like it. The book is structured with narrative, followed by info from published academic studies, and more general implications about cognition and intelligence at the end.
Heinrich deftly combines his own anecdotes about ‘his interesting friends’ the ravens with controlled studies, and while he has clear intuitions about hypotheses without nature-worthy evidence, he certainly convinced me about his opinions. I appreciate how he has dialed in the parameters of raven intelligence dismissing many anecdotes as impractical, but marveling over ones proving an important point, such as the pattern of peck marks on a moose carcass to remove an entire chunk of fat. That ravens posses such memory and geospacial reasoning is amazing.
He then brings it back to criticizing some of the prevailing beliefs about intelligence, specifically, that animals and especially birds are simply automatons, and unable to plan or reason, as well as building out the idea for a continuum of intelligence, and even pointing out that some signs of intelligence, such as play, are things we don’t have a very good definition for. These last few chapters were exactly what I wanted to get out of the book and I appreciate that the author included them.