[GeoStL] Re: North Cascades National Park
- From: Roger Barnes <rogbarn@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: geocaching@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 09 Sep 2006 16:36:42 -0500
-
Jim-
This is probably too far for you to go to on your trip, but the story is
interesting anyway:
Aggressive ravens display odd windshield wiper fetish
BY SHARON WOOTTON
Nature's journal
PVC pipe is not on the 10 essentials list for hikers, but if you're
doing some fall hiking or camping around Newhalem in the North Cascades
National Park, you might want to bring along a couple of 18-inch pieces.
It seems that at least two ravens have spent the hiking season ripping
out the rubber windshield wiper blades from their housings on various
vehicles, including some at the employee parking lot, at the Goodell
Creek Campground and near the visitor center.
Curious raven behavior began in May, however, when a raven continually
attacked the center's rear windows.
"A raven was adamant, from our perspective, about trying to get in. It
was frequently at the rear windows, scratching and pecking and flying up
and down at them. It behaved very aggressively toward the windows," said
acting chief interpreter Charles Beall.
Initially employees chalked it up to a territorial raven fighting its
reflection, thinking the reflection was an intruding raven.
"It was very aggressive, to the extent that it was bleeding from its
beak," Beall said.
Employees wrapped butcher paper around the first few feet of all of the
windows, but it was torn down by the next day.
Theories included reflection anxiety, trying to attack the two large
murals of ravens that were inside (they covered the murals) and wanting
to get in because it heard the raven calls that were played inside.
By June, the raven had given up windows and started on windshield
wipers.
"We started noticing missing windshield wipers. The blades were torn out
of the unit and left in the parking lot near the vehicles."
It turned out that there were two ravens doing the deed.
"We began covering our windshield wipers with little PVC pipes. All the
employees were doing it," Beall said.
They also posted warning signs.
"It could be serious if you were crossing Washington Pass and all of a
sudden there was a downpour and you didn't have any windshield wipers,"
Beall said.
They brought in bird researcher John Marzluff, co-author of "In the
Company of Crows and Ravens." He banded two vandals, but the capture
trauma didn't deter them.
Natural resources specialist Cathi Jones said she received 13
raven-related reports, most of them about windshield wipers, but had no
way of telling how many more incidents were not reported.
"We're still trying to figure out (why) windshield wipers. Ravens are
really intelligent, and there's a myriad of reasons why they could be
doing it."
Windshield-wiper wrestling is common in Alaska, she said.
"(Ravens) there seem to have some fetish for rubber windshield wipers or
other little car trim that's rubber. Here it's the wipers."
Last July, rangers reported that ravens were ripping off windshield
wipers (and a few antennas) in a Yosemite National Park parking lot.
Those ravens had a bartering gene, however. Sometimes they left dead
rodents on top of the vehicles, the one-pair-wipers-for-one-dead-vole
system.
CBC radio once reported that a principal from a New Brunswick, Canada,
school had removed more than 40 windshield wipers from vehicles in the
parking lot. One teaching assistant lost nine wipers, gained a lot of
scratches on her car, and had the car's soft top damaged by a raven
apparently trying to rip it off.
It's been relatively quiet the past few weeks at Newhalem, so maybe the
Grim Wipers have discovered another fetish.
This story is available at:
http://www.theolympian.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060909/OUTDOORS/609090382/1038
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