Tour de Raptor

Last weekend, four wildlife-focused naturalists hopped into a minivan with Erin, our onsite animal care coordinator, for a whirlwind weekend tour of different places in Minnesota that use live animals (specifically raptors) for environmental education purposes. Here's a super-brief summary of our four stops:

Lake Superior Zoo: Duluth, MN

An Eastern screech owl, one of the Lake Superior Zoo's education animals

The Lake Superior Zoo is a relatively small zoo that recently re-obtained its AZA accreditation  a testament to the dedication of the current staff to providing top-notch care for their animals, educational programming to the public, and commitment to conservation work and research. In addition to the usual crew of zoo charismatic megafauna (including bears, lynx, tigers, and lions), the zoo has a number of education animals. The three educators on staff teach programs on-site and also travel off-site for various outreach programs. The education animals include trained birds: an Eastern screech owl, a peregrine falcon, a red-tailed hawk, and five different parrots. In addition to the birds, the educators will use live mammalian, reptilian, and amphibian ambassadors, with education animals ranging from snakes to rabbits. While the zoo-keepers maintain clean enclosures and provide daily diet, the training of the animals for educational programs is a responsibility that falls strictly to the education staff.

The Raptor Center: St. Paul, MN

Pi, an immature bald eagle on the Raptor Center's education team

I visited the raptor center for three days in November, so I already had a pretty good idea of what their operation looks like. The raptor center includes both an education department and a rehabilitation center. The education department houses more than 40 captive raptors (all permanently disabled - Wolf Ridge's three captive raptors came from the Raptor Center) and has "cornered the market for Twin Cities metropolitan area off-site raptor education programs." During our visit, we took a quick tour, chatted with Mike, the on-site caretaker for the morning, and sat in on a birthday party raptor program for a three-year old.

Mike teaches a group of very small children and their parents about great horned owls.

The Raptor Center operates in a similar way to Wolf Ridge in the care and management of the raptors, but it's interesting to observe because they are caring for 40+ birds compared to our three. It's a large-scale operation that relies on great organization and communication amongst the five education staff members, as well as more than 60 weekly volunteers.

Minnesota Zoo: Apple Valley, MN

So, first of all, I have to brag about the fact that I got to go to the zoo for free (usually $18 for adults). We made sure to walk around the various exhibits and Erin reminisced about her former days as an intern on the tropics trail. However, the purpose of our trip was to see the World of Birds Show, which started with a backstage tour with the head bird trainer, Dave. This was the last weekend of their "winter show" (indoor venue). Behind the main stage was where about 20 education birds were kept. The zoo does two or three shows a day, utilizing about ten birds per show, so each show has a varying cast of characters to prevent from overworking the birds. The zoo uses a wide variety of birds for the show, including owls, hawks, parrots, macaws, cockatoos, and toucans.

A World of Birds Show toucan.

A World of Birds Show snowy owl.

Watching the show itself was a really interesting experience. The zoo takes a vastly different approach to live animal education than Wolf Ridge. While we spend a good deal of time talking about each bird, expecting our students to sit quietly and listen, the zoo's program was fast-paced and chaotic, introducing ten different birds in just under a half-hour. Dave said that their main goal is not passing knowledge onto the audience, but rather creating an experience full of "wow" moments that will stick in the minds and memories of kids and adults alike. They are trying to create awareness and stewardship by tugging at the heart-strings of their audience (ultimately, that is what we are trying to do as well, but in a different setting and a different way). Due to the chaotic nature of the audience, the birds have to be incredibly well-trained - I was totally impressed by the behavior of these birds. Part of the difference here is that many of their birds were born in captivity, whereas our birds are wild birds with permanent disabilities. This was probably the highlight of the weekend for me, to see a place that has the exact same goals as us in mind with regards to live animal education, but accomplishes it in such a vastly different (and, admittedly, much showier) way.

Dave introduces the crowd to Coconut, a somewhat famous sulfur-crested cockatoo. You can see the stage they use - the bird show is like a theatrical performance, complete with light cues, videos, and timed bird entrances and exits.

The Eurasian eagle owl is the largest species of owl in the world (this is a male - the females are even bigger).

After the show, Dave let us personally meet one of the stars, a conure parrot.

After the show, Dave gave us a quick tour of their summer-show arena, including some of the summer-show birds hanging out backstage.

This may be the strangest species of bird I have ever seen in my life - it's a vulture species from Africa.

Audubon Center of the North Woods: Sandstone, MN

Of all the places we visited, Audubon was the most similar to Wolf Ridge - a residential environmental learning center in Minnesota. The main difference is that each of the wildlife interns is assigned to one or two of their birds and they are responsible for all of their care and training, whereas at Wolf Ridge, we all work with all of the birds, even though some of us may tend to spend more time working with certain birds (Korppi the raven and Hunter the great horned owl, in my case). The Audubon Center has a barn where all of the animals live, as well as the rock wall. In addition to seven raptors, the center has a raven and a crow. It was great to see them doing enrichment with their birds and compare notes. I also got a ton of new, great ideas to introduce to Korppi in the coming months. The Audubon Center also houses a number of amphibians and reptiles, again giving me lots of ideas for the curriculum I'm currently working on for Wolf Ridge. Lastly, for mammalian representatives, the center has a rabbit and a porcupine. A lot of time was spent comparing the general cuteness between their porcupine, Spike, and ours, Thistle (with the overwhelming opinion that Thistle is cuter, but of course, we are terribly biased).

The resident barred owl at the Audubon Center.

In addition to all of these visits, we had a chance to have dinner with Emily (WR naturalist from last year), eat ice-cream with our recently re-located education director, and spend two lovely evenings with Erin's parents. It was a great weekend both in giving us some new ideas to try at Wolf Ridge, as well as getting me to think more about the bigger picture of my life. I never really took the idea of working at a zoo seriously, for example, but I have an entirely different perspective on what that career might actually look like. Either way, working with our education animals has been totally rewarding and I hope Wolf Ridge isn't the last place that I get to form those kinds of relationships.

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.

Ravens: Big Bird Brains

I've been working a lot with Korppi (our captive raven) these past couple of weeks, as I try to develop new enrichment activities for her and formalize an enrichment schedule. I know that she is a smart bird. In a recent training session, she learned that when I said "station" I wanted her to perch on a rock in the corner of her enclosure in a matter of five minutes and then proceeded to try and trick me into giving her more treats. I can see the wheels turning in her head when we present her with a contraption that she has to open or unlock to retrieve the food inside. At the risk of anthropomorphizing her, I would classify her reaction as "curious" when I hung a pair of sparkly pants from one of her perches last week. She's a smart bird. And I know from the literature (and straight up reputation) that ravens are considered one of the smartest. But I wanted to know why.

Korppi tries to retrieve peanuts punched into an old egg-carton top that was dangling from her perch.

So, I turned once again to Bernd Heinrich, biologist, author, and raven expert. I recently finished his second book about ravens, Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds. This is his account of his observations, experiments, and experiences with a group of captive ravens he reared, as well as many wild ravens that he encountered. I highly recommend the book - one story after another of the amazing feats and incredible mind-power of these intriguing birds.

To answer the "why" of all these smarts, we have to go straight to the brain. All vertebrates have a similar brain structure, composed of a hindbrain, midbrain, and forebrain. The hind and midbrain are generally responsible for sensory information and organizing movement and attention. The forebrain, on the other hand, is where conscious activity takes place, including learning and memory. While hind and midbrains don't show much size-variability in different vertebrate species, forebrain sizes are incredibly diverse. The reason humans have such large brains is because of our large forebrains.

In general, the greater one's brain volume, the more information that species can process. Bigger animals require bigger brains simply to control their bigger bodies; so brain size predictably increases proportionally to body size. When a brain is bigger than predicted based on body size, this is called "encephalization." Thus, second only to dolphins, humans are the most encephalized animals on the planet. In the 1940's Adolphe Portman, a Swiss zoologist measured and compiled data on bird brain volumes. He discovered that on average, the corvids (the family of birds to which ravens belong, in addition to crows and jays) have the highest encephalization of all bird families. As it turns out, ravens are not only the most encephalized of the corvids, but of all the birds.

We can correlate intelligence with brain size because more brain volume means more neurons and synapses, which are directly connected to one's information processing powers (this is neuroscience at its most watered down aka the only way I will ever understand neuroscience!). When discussing intelligence, though, we have to clarify intelligence "with reference to what." Most primates, for example, have high levels of encephalization and the extra "brain space" is dedicated to visual processing, because they are highly visual creatures.

So why do ravens have such high levels of encephalization? One could argue that extra bird-brain-space is needed for flight capabilities; however, dragonflies (and other flying insects) have four wings, six legs, and no encephalization, while ravens only have two wings and two legs. Furthermore, having a large brain is a HUGE energy expenditure: humans' brains take up 1.5% of our body weight but 20% of our energy reserves. Anthropological studies have shown that human brains made a leap in size when humans switched from being strictly herbivores to omnivores. Nonetheless, hawks and ravens are equally effective predators, despite hawks' significantly smaller brains, so the ability to hunt is a weak explanation for an enlarged brain.

The latest research is actually indicating that ravens' (and our) large brains could primarily be accounted for by social complexity. In turn, the ability to not just recognize others, but SPECIFIC others increases social complexity, creating a sort of positive feedback (big brains enable social complexity which encourages bigger brains). Ravens are highly social creatures: Heinrich describes in many chapters the social hierarchies that exist within groups, their ability to recognize other individuals, the formation of pairs and coalitions of pairs, and the mutual relationships formed with dangerous predators. These and more require instant reactions and making choices that when made in the head, are much safer and quicker. In other words, they require consciousness. That ravens are such social creatures seems to explain, more than anything else, their large brain size. And that large, encephalized brain, is why Korppi has no trouble remembering where she's cached hundreds of raisins all over her enclosure, among many other remarkable feats.

Korppi investigates the strange, black box I've brought into her enclosure.