Raven Enrichment

(I apologize that the videos in this post are such low quality. I can't upload gigantic video files into blogger, so this is the best I can do).

I've posted a couple times about Korppi, our captive raven, and how she's a pretty smart bird (biggest brain in the bird world).  Since Korppi has this large brain, our daily challenge as animal caretakers is to keep her brain engaged. Furthermore, since she is living in a small enclosure instead of in the great outdoors, we need to keep her body active. We've been creating tons of daily enrichment activities for her, constantly assessing to see if the enrichment is keeping her occupied and appearing to be challenging to some degree. Her enrichment comes in the form of a multitude of different activities that encourage a healthy body and mind, but generally fall into four larger categories: 

-Foraging enrichment is creating a situation where Korppi has to work to obtain her food. This is especially important because ravens are scavengers in the wild, meaning they are always searching and working to obtain their food. For Korppi, we might hide peanuts around her enclosure, put raisins in the branches of her tree, bury a hard-boiled egg in the snow, put crickets in a plastic container with one small opening, or put live minnows in her pool of water. In all cases, she has to do some level of work to find and/or obtain her food, just like she would in the wild.

For this foraging enrichment, we gave Korppi three pinecones with peanut-butter and raisins in them. They are a relatively new item to her, so she is treating them with great caution. When ravens approach a potential food source in the wild, they have to ensure that it is dead, so they often will approach and then fly back quickly, as she demonstrates here, until they gain more confidence.

-Sensory enrichment is anything that engages Korppi’s senses of vision, hearing, smell, or taste. In other words, we are constantly putting novel stimuli in her enclosure to mimic the fact that she would always be encountering new things in the wild. This might include hanging a colorful toy from a perch, playing frog call sounds on a CD player, or adding interesting spices to her food.

For this sensory enrichment, we put a cake pan, a novel item, in Korppi's enclosure. The pan would initially be visual enrichment as it is new and shiny and if she eventually approached it, could be aural enrichment, as it makes loud noises when dropped, moved, and pecked at with a raven beak. In this video, Korppi is constantly moving around her enclosure, looking at the cake pan from all different angles. Eventually, she must have approached it, because when I returned later that day, it had shifted positions.

-Manipulanda enrichment is anything that Korppi can manipulate or “play with,” that will specifically challenge her motor skills. This represents the effort that is oftentimes required for ravens to obtain food in the wild. This might include giving her a phonebook to tear apart, hiding food inside a paper bag filled with newspaper strips, or putting treats inside of an old mayonnaise container that she has to figure out how to open up.

This is one of our favorite manipulation enrichment activities: half of an egg carton with peanuts punctured into it hanging from a perch. There are multiple steps that Korppi has to figure out how to maneuver: getting the carton up to her perch, getting the peanuts out of the carton, and then getting the peanuts out of the shells.

-Training involves working with a human and performing certain actions to earn positive reinforcement (in this case, raisins, mealworms, peanuts, etc). I wrote a little bit about training in a previous blog post (http://miskwaadesi.blogspot.com/2012/12/training-korppi.html). When Erin and I first started training Korppi, our main objective was simply to get her comfortable with humans (specifically us) and teach her to correlate humans with positive experiences. This primarily involved giving her lots of treats for coming closer and closer to us. As Korppi learned to trust us, we began to train her to do more complex activities, which has included perching on various perches in the enclosure, flying to perch on our arms, or staying in one spot while we enter and leave her enclosure. Training is an important part of Korppi’s daily enrichment because she is constantly trying to figure out what we want, how she can earn a treat, and we are able to positively reinforce behaviors that will help Korppi to be a more successful education animal.

I have been trying to incorporate students into the creation of Korppi's daily enrichment activities when I teach our birds class. I explain a little bit about Korppi's story and the necessity of enrichment to the students and then ask them what activity we should make for her. The kids always come up with great ideas. For example, one class had me take three identical containers into her enclosure and show her that I was putting apple slices into one of them. Then I mixed up the containers to see if Korppi would remember and go for the one with the apple slices first. She didn't, but he look of wonder on that class of eighth graders’ faces as Korppi figured out how to get the apple slices out of a closed yogurt container was just one more demonstration to me of how many great lessons this education animal can teach us all.