Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
On several occasions we've watched ravens below the house, picking up golf balls and carrying
them about. Sometimes they've pecked at them briefly, and other times not at all. Twice we've watched
a raven walk about from ball to ball, picking them up and dropping them. That performance was im-
mediately followed by quite different behavior: in each instance, the raven gathered dried grass with its
beak and covered up a number of the balls. We were able to observe this activity in great detail through
binoculars, since the ravens were only a hundred yards from the house.
The astonishing thing is that although I marked the location of these covered golf balls with great
care, using a variety of landmarks, I had the devil's own time finding the balls—and some I never did
locate! In each instance, the raven took only a moment to cover each ball, yet the job was done so clev-
erly and thoroughly that the ball became virtually invisible.
At another time, a raven “played” with several of the golf balls—then picked one up in its beak and
flew straight to the broken top of a large dead maple along the side of the field. We were watching
through binoculars and clearly saw the raven deposit the ball in the hollow in the broken top before
taking wing again.
What these ravens were exhibiting was, of course, caching behavior. However,
why
they wanted to
cache golf balls is another question. The obvious inference is that the ravens thought the round, white
balls were some type of egg. Still, they had pecked at the balls, carried them about, and otherwise ma-
nipulated them with their beaks. It's difficult to believe that these seemingly intelligent birds would be
fooled for very long into thinking that a golf ball was an egg.
It seems more likely that the egg like shape and appearance of golf balls trigger an innate response
in the birds. Even though the ravens “know” from experience that the golf balls aren't eggs, the balls
nonetheless arouse their curiosity and elicit a degree of possessiveness that leads them to cache these
strange objects.
In view of this demonstrated fondness for golf balls, I wasn't surprised to learn that a large number
of ravens disrupted a championship golf match in Iceland by swooping down and pirating balls. In fact,
they did such a thorough job that the match had to be moved to another location! Neither does it seem
strange that at the Yellowknife golf course in far northern Canada, close to the Arctic Circle, ravens
make off with between two hundred and three hundred
dozen
golf balls a year just from the driving
range.
Crows also have a thing about golf balls, though it takes a slightly different form from that of ravens.
On several occasions we've seen crows pick up a golf ball or two, but they seem to lose interest in them
faster than the ravens do. Moreover, crows don't exhibit the raven's caching behavior, so they made no
attempt to hide the balls.
On the other hand, crows have long had a reputation as mischief-makers because of their propensity
for collecting a wide variety of baubles, especially bright or shiny ones. On one particular occasion my
curiosity was piqued by a black object partially hidden in the foliage of a tree along the edge of the
field. Wondering whether it was a crow, a raven, or a black cat, I put the binoculars on it.
