Intelligence is a wonderful virtue. The catalytic force that empowers our every endeavor, it allows us to process and act upon the information we receive from the world. It makes possible our schemes to provide nourishment to our bodies and our minds while flooding our world with art and literature, ideas and accolades. But for all that human civilization would not exist without intellect to actualize and perpetuate it, it does have one consequential flaw. For it allows its possessor to imagine himself superior to others, a being not only above his fellows, but above all the lesser creatures with whom he shares his world. It would be bad enough if this arrogance had merely caused the wholesale slaughter of his fellow human beings, or the hunting for sport and not predation of his fellow animals. But it has also caused him to assume that no other creature in his world is like him, capable of reason, dignity and insight. It is this myth that Misters angell and Marzluff puncture so effectively in this captivating examination of a winning creature.
Corvids, that family of birds that claims as members both ravens and crows, have, for decades, stunned scientists with their mental capacity. Initially thought to be on an intellectual par with their fellow avians, with evidence to the contrary dismissed as embellishments, years of systematic study of these large-brained birds has revealed some shocking similarities with humans. For Corvids have been seen to mourn their dead, to hold grudges against those who have harmed them, to trade kindness for food, and to enter monogamous relationships with their partners. They share food, raise their young, encourage them to play as a means of learning, and then send them into the world. They use tools and memories; they have friends and foes. By any measurement, they are intelligent and self-aware, displaying all the behaviors humans do, though, in a much more rudimentary form. After 600-million years of evolution, they stand with us as the intelligent outgrowth of the great experiment in life known as Earth.
Combining legends and anatomy lessons, tall tales and scientifically rigorous experiments, Misters Angell and Marzluff, both avid observers of wildlife, document, in Gifts of The Crow, the breathtaking capacity of a remarkable creature. Descriptions of the Corvid's willingness to learn and adapt through play and experience are as eerie as they are compelling. For one cannot help but recognize the numerous ways in which Corvid maturation is like our own childhoods. The life-long bonds of friendship juxtaposed against their ability to feel enmity, to sew discord, not only charges the reader with the excitement and the delight of seeing and knowing that we are not alone, it reminds him that the world was not made for him, that we are as much a beautiful accident as the Corvid, and that intelligent life is, in some fundamental way, universal, an outgrowth of neurons and not a blessing of the divine.
While maintaining an academic tone throughout, while steeping their work in research not hearsay, Gifts of The Crow is, nonetheless, a moving treatise on the quiet, pervasive spirituality of intelligent life in all its mystery, its grace, and its beauty. Utterly potent without being, in any respect, ideological, or polemical, which is, in and of itself, an achievement. (4/5 Stars)
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