Animals stealing your gear

1975 in the Adirondacks, in the Heart Lake region, a small bear caused havoc all along a trail, including clawing his way into tents.  In those days people didn’t take hardly any precautions.  I hung our food at the front of our lean-to, mainly to keep it away from mice.  In the middle of the night campers from down the trail showed up, a bear was in their tent.  I checked our food and there was nothing left but the top half of a stuff sack…he’d been to our lean-to already.

Mid-1990’s, same area, two sacks hung high and well away from trees.  At dusk we watched helplessly as a large bear first tried one tree, then another to get to our food.  After a massive leap he reached one bag and dragged it down with him to the ground.

I wonder if it was the same bear.

Jerry, re the crows/ravens:

Then, after those ravens had lived out their life, the researcher repeated walking around wearing the ape mask and the ravens again made a ruckess.

So, the ravens had communicated to their offspring not to trust humans wearing an ape mask.  They told their kids “by the way, if you ever see a human wearing a mask, don’t let them catch you or they’ll pull on your wings and stuff” or something to that effect.

It was widely reported this way in several press stories that presumably copied one another without checking the original research, but it did not happen that way.   Crows are extremely smart, but not quite that smart.

What actually happened:
Guy in mask is mean to crows;
Crows specifically “scold” the guy in that mask whenever he reappears;
Other crows who weren’t originally involved copy the mask-specific scolding behavior;
Community scolding of person wearing that specific mask continues whenever he reappears for years after the original event.

So the crows who learn the behavior second-hand are learning it by seeing the masked man show up and observing that other crows scold that guy.  It’s still pretty remarkable how specific it is and how long the behavior persists in the community.   But crows are NOT mysteriously somehow communicating how a masked bad guy looks to other crows who have never seen him.  They are just “pointing out” the bad guy to other crows when he shows up.

The researcher is called John Marzluff, here is giving a TED talk about his work.  He talks about the mask expt from around minute 19.

There’s a pretty cool video right at the beginning, where a crow given a straight wire proceeds to bend it to recover a hidden reward.

Yeah, I just re-watched Nova “Bird Brain”

Still, they’re pretty smart : )

On my first backpacking trip with Stephanie in ‘90 on the Olympic Coast (WA) – raccoons. They unzipped an outside pocket on her pack and stole her camera.

Early 90s at a camp on the Dosewallips River, packrats stole my KFC Spork. I followed it back to its stash under a nurse log and found silverware, firestarting supplies, foil wrappers, a wilderness permit, a headlamp, and a condom wrapper.

Since then, not as much luck, disfortune, or entertainment.

Oh no, that’s what I was worried about, I’ll have to protect my spoon better : )

I was just at the beach of the Olympics, only raccoon tracks