<\/a>Sunset falls over an Interior Alaska landscape into which hundreds of ravens flew recently. (Courtesy Photo \/ Ned Rozell)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
It was hard to comprehend this river of life above a winter landscape that felt so dead minutes before.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
I started counting. Shivering too. I went back inside the cabin when I hit 129 ravens. Inside, I heard more talking as birds continued to pass overhead.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
The ravens, coming from the direction of Fairbanks more than 30 miles away, were probably headed to a communal roosting site for the night. In this case, that gathering place might have been the spruce hillside behind the cabin, farther than I could see. I imagined a group of trees decorated with black ornaments.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Scientists in Fairbanks, in Anchorage and outside Alaska have studied raven roosts. They have wondered why the birds gather together at night, sometimes in urban areas and other times in wild ones far from people.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
In the 1990s, Bernd Heinrich and John and Colleen Marzluff — all then at the University of Vermont — climbed trees in Maine before sunset to watch ravens roosting in groves of eastern white pine trees. After much watching and a little experimentation, they came up with the theory that the nighttime resting areas were “information centers,” where ravens shared news about recently fallen deer carcasses. They came to that conclusion by capturing ravens and then releasing them near new food sources the scientists had dragged out on the landscape.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“The most dramatic case was the bird that returned with roost-mates on the day after discovery,” the scientists wrote in a 1996 paper. “We had released the radio-tagged bird at a pile of meat two hours before sunset. It remained near the food, but did not feed.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
As night fell, that raven then joined a roost in a pine grove a few kilometers away.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“Before dawn the following morning 30 ravens arrived… , flying directly from the nearby roost. The radio-tagged bird was among the first five to arrive.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
With that and other observations, the scientists seemed to prove that ravens in the wild share news, but what about ravens that commute every winter day to and from Alaska cities?<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t