Ravens in Winter
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.12 (547 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0671678094 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 379 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 0000-00-00 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
ealovitt said Eight tons of meat, four Maine winters, and crowds of ravens. "Ravens in Winter" is about solving a biological puzzle: "Do common ravens, 'Corvus corax,' actively disclose to strangers of their species the valuable and rare food bonanzas that one of them is lucky enough to find?"In order to solve his self-discovered mystery, Bernd Heinrich spent four winters in the woods of Maine and Vermont, hauling eight tons of dead animals to bait stations in the midst of howling blizzards. All in the name of fun---I mean, science.This is one of the best, most exuberant books I've ever read on how an . "Five Stars" according to M'Hutti. intersting. Exploration in Ethology Amazon Customer This book provides an introduction into how questions of animal behavior are asked and answered. Heinrich, a professor of zoology and naturalist noticed that crows seemed to call others to join them when they discovered large animal kills in the winter. Such behavior would seem to be against the crows' best interest, since an individual crow could perhaps have more food if it kept it all for itself. This set Heinrich's curiosity afire, which impelled him to embark on a multi-year study of crow behavior so that he could determin
On a cold Maine day in October 1984, Bernd Heinrich, a field biologist, saw a flock of ravens sharing their food and apparently calling other ravens to join in. What he found rivals a detective story in its complexity, complete with false leads, contradictory clues and finally, hard evidence. Heinrich watched ravens from the top of a giant spruce while they foraged, scaled cliffs to take fledglings for banding, set up a giant aviary. He was relentless. "Inspired, fresh and fascinating." --Peter Matthiessen. This struck Heinrich as so unexpected (why should solitary animals share?) that he spent seven years trying to find out whether this was what they were really doing, and if it was, why
Highly Recommended. Ravens are among the most elusive and yet (or, consequently) fascinating animals of North American I have ever encountered. Heinrich--an incredibly patient and cold-hardy fellow, not to mention, a heck of a writer--studied ravens in the dead of winter in Maine, and made some remarkable discoveries of how these normally solitary birds would actually engage in food sharing. Few of the many works on behavioral ecology I have read so compellingly capture the tedium of field work, the inscrutability of subject animals, and the satisfaction of discovery that provides even greater warmth than a blazing wood fire in the middle of a northern winter.