Last Tuesday two ravens in Fairbanks alighted on a power transformer on Minnie Street and were electrocuted.

The event didn’t cause any power outages or fires. The only reason anyone in Anchorage—or even the other side of Fairbanks—knows abut the event is because of what happened next. According to an account in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, “… hundreds of ravens showed up within a minute or two and started silently circling overhead and perching in nearby trees.”

The News-Miner’s story relied on eyewitness accounts, particularly that of Rod Stephens, a nearby storeowner. He told the paper he thought the birds numbered “a couple hundred.” Another witness, a half-mile away, saw what he described as “a funnel of black birds.” Then, after a few minutes, they departed.

What made the whole thing striking was the News-Miner’s headline: “Hundreds of birds seem to mourn deaths of fellow ravens.”

Although the article offered scant evidence (the one state Fish and Game biologist they talked to downplayed the idea of a raven funeral), the idea that the birds might be grieving seemed to capture imaginations.

The story was picked up by the Anchorage Daily News, first as a link in its Newsreader section, then—when a version of the News-Miner story ran on the Associated Press wire—in print and online.

Both the News-Miner and ADN stories generated plenty of comments, ranging from those that suggested the ravens were scavengers vying to cannibalize their dead fellows, to others vouching for the species’ spiritual powers.

If this were a particularly slow news week—and the weeks before a major holiday can be—you could chalk this up to bored cubicle workers, commenting for lack of something better to do. But it wasn’t.

Sarah Palin’s book Going Rogue was released the same day the two ravens died, and the clamor surrounding it has yet to die down. Mayor Dan Sullivan and the Anchorage Assembly are wrangling over the city’s budget, and the politics surrounding that process haven’t been without controversy. There was a shooting death in South Anchorage that police are now calling a homicide.

But something drew these readers to this peculiar story, one of no particular consequence.

Maybe it had something to do with the nature of the behavior. It can be awkward or problematic to ascribe human values to non-human animals, of course, yet it’s hard not to notice when they behave in ways that we think of as being fundamentally human.

There’s no proof that the birds were grieving at all.

Yet their actions seemed to be both deliberate, and at the same time, lacking any obvious practical objective or motive.

That’s a combination that, for our big primate brains, conditioned to seeking order and causality in everything, is too intriguing to pass up.

If ravens are attracted to shiny things, we’re attracted to mysteries. And when the mystery in some small way holds up a mirror to us—makes us contemplate ourselves—well, it’s so much the shinier, then.

Mysteries like this one might evoke wonder, and elicit curiosity about the natural world, but it more rarely makes us consider our own place in it. What, I wonder, would the ravens have made of the fact that their brief funnel became front-page news in a human newspaper? What events from our human world would make headlines in the ravens’ universe? Certainly not the release of a political memoir and the bickering and grandstanding it caused. A city budget, maybe? Doubtful—though perhaps road kill increases under administrations that pave roads more aggressively, or food scraps become less plentiful in a recession. A homicide? It’s possible to imagine a debate between xenophobic birds who’d cluck about how clearly it shows that humans are a dangerous and depraved species, and more progressive ones arguing that human behavior can’t be properly understood through the lens of raven social mores.

All of this is silly, an exercise in amusing, but useless, anthropomorphism. Except.

Except for the fact that it has an odd, and possibly useful effect. Taking a moment to try—however futilely—to see the world through alien eyes, gives us a perspective on what might be really important in the long run. The question of where Levi Johnston will have Thanksgiving dinner, for instance, suddenly seems a lot more trivial.

Maybe that’s why so many native cultures and traditions, from Alaska to Northern Europe are full of stories where when humans watch the ravens (or the bear or the eagle or the deer) the raven watches back.

We’re headed into a rare holiday where our otherwise busy and frenetic society encourages us to take a reflective pause. We’ll have a rare chance to congregate in our own circles, perhaps see something from a new perspective, and, after a moment’s pause, depart.

krestia.degeorge@anchoragepress.com