In the Company of Crows and Ravens [Hardcover]

John M. Marzluff (Author), Tony Angell (Illustrator), Paul R. Ehrlich (Foreword), John M. Marzluff (Author), Tony Angell (Author), Paul Ehrlich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 2005

“Crows and people share similar traits and social strategies. To a surprising extent, to know the crow is to know ourselves.”—from the Preface

From the cave walls at Lascaux to the last painting by Van Gogh, from the works of Shakespeare to those of Mark Twain, there is clear evidence that crows and ravens influence human culture. Yet this influence is not unidirectional, say the authors  of this fascinating book: people profoundly influence crow culture, ecology, and evolution as well.

John Marzluff and Tony Angell examine the often surprising ways that crows and humans interact. The authors contend that those interactions reflect a process of “cultural coevolution.” They offer a challenging new view of the human-crow dynamic—a view that may change our thinking not only about crows but also about ourselves.

Featuring more than 100 original drawings, the book takes a close look at the influences people have had on the lives of crows throughout history and at the significant ways crows have altered human lives. In the Company of Crows and Ravens illuminates the entwined histories of crows and people and concludes with an intriguing discussion of the crow-human relationship and how our attitudes toward crows may affect our cultural trajectory.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Historically feared, hunted and otherwise maligned, corvids (crows, ravens and the like) have finally found in the coauthors two champions of their cause. Professor Marzluff and artist and writer Angell, in their decades of observing crows and ravens (Angell's illustrations complement the text), have compiled an eye-popping catalogue of crow feats: Japanese carrion crows use moving cars as nutcrackers; Seattle crows, after being trapped by the authors, have learned to avoid them, even in the midst of thousands of UW-students; and, given the choice between french fries in a plain bag or a McDonald's bag, crows choose the branded bag every time. Marzluff and Angell entertain with these stories, but find less success with their arguments that no other animal has been as influential to human culture, and the two species have been for centuries involved in a "cultural coevolution." In essence, shifts in our culture cause crows to adapt, and in response, our culture responds, ad infinitum. They provide a litany of examples of crow influences on human culture (think Counting Crows, cave art and doctors dressed up as crows during the Black Death) and point to the similarities between human and crow cultures (particularly that of social learning) as evidence for the book's unofficial maxim: "to know the crow is to know ourselves." While the claims made here may over-reach, Marzluff and Angell passionately argue crows' importance, and along the way, provide ample evidence of corvid ingenuity.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Crows are one of the few birds that everyone can recognize. As ubiquitous members of the worldwide corvid family (which also includes the ravens, jays, magpies, and their kin), the more than 40 distinct species of crows have formed both practical and mythic relationships with their human neighbors. In this delightful blend of science, art, and anthropology, biologist Marzluff and illustrator Angell, both fascinated by the corvids, demonstrate why the crows and ravens are worthy of study and respect. Crows and ravens are adaptable, intelligent, and able to learn, remember, and use insight to solve problems. They use unique methods to obtain food, such as pulling up the lines of ice fishermen and rolling walnuts under car wheels. Humans have long noted these large, black, brainy birds, and their images have entered human culture (we "eat crow," open things with a "crowbar") and human mythology (the Norse god Odin was guided by two ravens). The text travels easily from science to folklore to literature, which, along with Angell's lively black-and-white illustrations, recommends this book highly. Nancy Bent
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 408 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (October 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300100760
• ISBN-13: 978-0300100761
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #728,769 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

97 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Monkeys With Wings, January 3, 2006

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In the Company of Crows and Ravens (Hardcover)

"Gregarious, family grouped, long-lived, diurnal, vocally and visually astute, and reliant on memory and individual recognition." Yes, that might be a biological description of us humans, but it's a description from _In the Company of Crows and Ravens_ (Yale University Press) by John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell. We share those traits with the birds that are the subject of this fine book, mostly because we, like they, have big brains and use them. Dolphins and humans have bigger brain-to-body ratios, but the crow and raven ratio is something like that of most primates: "Mentally, crows and ravens are more like flying monkeys than they are like other birds." As a result, we have had a richer history of cooperating with these corvids (the family also includes rooks, jackdaws, and magpies) and competing against them. As a measure of our attention to these birds, for instance, this wide-ranging book cites their influence on our language; cats and dogs have more words, but no wild animal has more than crows and ravens. The examples include scarecrow, crow's feet, crowbar, and ravenous. We also crow about good news, but we also from time to time have to eat crow. We say "as the crow flies" when we want to indicate a linear distance between geographical points, but that's out of ignorance: crows take breaks and (as befits birds with brains) get distracted to check out other routes along the way. Crows and ravens have been our partners throughout history, and this broad and brightly-written book will increase anyone's appreciation for them and for the partnership.

Crows and ravens are scavengers on what humans throw out; so are pigeons and seagulls, for that matter, but those aren't as intelligent or observant as corvids. They could have managed in the wild without humans, but they have been able to thrive in our towns and cities. People who admire crows and ravens generally do so because they have a reputation for being clever, or even sagacious. There are many examples given here of intelligent behavior. Crows have a good communication system, and the authors encourage you to try playing mind games with them by broadcasting commercially-available recordings of crow calls. Crows who hear a distress call, for instance, do not immediately fly away from the call; instead, they fly to it to investigate what is going on, and perhaps learn about the danger. After that, they may stay away for weeks. As befits animals with intelligence, crows play; they may play catch with paper or sticks for no reason except that it seems to be an enjoyable way to spend time. They deliberately climb snowy hills to sled down again on their bellies, and they do this repeatedly. They do rolls, dives, and loops when flying. Crows even use us to do their bidding. In Sendai, northern Japan, carrion crows don't just use gravity to crack the walnuts of which they are fond. They have learned to fly down in front of cars waiting for a stoplight to change, place the nut in front of a wheel, and then fly away to await the result of the human-driven nutcracker. The crows are changing human behavior; drivers in the area intentionally drive over nuts in the road just to help the crows out.

This book makes clear the surprising case that crows have a culture, one that we modify a great deal, while they have made their own modifications on ours by behavior that gets them included in our stories and legends (and, of course, making nut-crackers of us). It invites readers to make their own observations and send them to the authors; corvids are so ubiquitous that almost anyone can take them up on the offer. Marzluff is a professor in wildlife science, and Angell is a freelance artist and writer whose handsome drawings make this a particularly good-looking volume. They even hint that interaction with us is making crows smarter: "We suggest they are becoming smarter because learning, memory, and cultural evolution are so strongly favored by an increasingly complex urban lifestyle." Take up this book and help keep up our side of the race.

102 of 108 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tells the story of a partnership between human being and crow, October 25, 2005

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Boria Sax (White Plains, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In the Company of Crows and Ravens (Hardcover)

In the Company of Crows and Ravens recounts in great deal how crows and human beings have lived intimately together, influencing the cultural and biological evolution of one another. Crows have developed ingenious ways to take advantage of human presence, from opening garbage bags to using automobiles to crack nuts. They have developed complex societies that resemble those of human beings, based on the nuclear family yet incorporating many other kinds of associations. They probably excel all animals but human beings in the manufacture of tools and the use of language. They share with dogs a remarkable ability to "read" human gestures and expressions. And yet, perhaps because it so pervades our daily lives, we take this partnership with crows, together with the responsibilities that accompany it, for granted. As this book documents, it is an important part of what has made us "human."

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Irresistable birds, fascinating trivia, interesting science, August 13, 2006

By 

R. Kelly Wagner "[e-mail]" (MD, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In the Company of Crows and Ravens (Hardcover)

Fascinating book. The sheer amount of literary and artistic references the authors bring in serve to show the importance of crows to our culture. The epigraph is a Robert Frost poem, "Dust of Snow."

Lots of facts and trivia. For example: 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. 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.

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).

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?