Ravens get a bad rap
Jane Crawford tells us about a bird with a blackened reputation:
Once upon a midnight dreary,
while I pondered, weak and weary …
So begins Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” the perfect poem for Halloween. A dark tale of death … about a grieving lover haunted, taunted, by the hovering presence of a raven.
- “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe (Poetry Foundation)
Such a nasty reputation for an animal that’s actually wicked smart.
How intelligent? “I would say as intelligent as great apes or dolphins,” said Rebecca Sturniolog, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington.
She feels that ravens get a bad rap.
For one, ravens have a big brain. “Especially relative to their size,” she told Crawford. “They use it to think for things. They use it to solve puzzles, to communicate with each other, to assess what’s going on in their environment.”
And into their environment is where Crawford went.
Ravens are crafty -- hiding food, manipulating a string to eat a mouse. A raven named Iris even knows how to paint. Some can mimic human voice.
Often confused with crows, ravens are larger, have a wedged-shape tail, and a low-throaty caw.
We see them in the wild, in captivity, and in popular culture: “The Birds,” “Game of Thrones,” in comic books and folklore.
So why do we associate them with evil?
“That deep black of the feathers, the eyes that seem like they’re always watching, like they never blink, and then they’re always around dead things, because they’re scavengers. They like to pick at corpses,” said professor Caetlin Benson-Allott, who specializes in the horror genre at Georgetown University.
She says the mythology goes back centuries.
“Ravens are ominous birds in literature going back all the way to Shakespeare,” she said. “They come up in ‘Macbeth.’ They come up in ‘Othello.’ Lysander in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ asks, ‘Would anyone not trade a raven for a dove?’ He’s referencing the book of Genesis there.
“It’s important that we remember that ravens have connoted death and the supernatural for hundreds of years.”
“It’s really weird to be so close to something that you’ve heard so many terrible, frightening things about,” Crawford said. Beauty and brains … ravens have been both maligned and misunderstood.
Will I fear them from now on? To quote “The Raven”: “Nevermore.”
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