Too Cool for School

Source In 2005, an ecologist named Crow White drove to 12 locations inside an elk hunting zone in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and fired a .30-06 rifle into the air. Before each shot, he counted every raven within 100 meters. Then he pulled the trigger, waited ten minutes, and counted again. On different days at those same spots, he ran the exact same test using an air horn, a whistle, or silence. The ravens only came to the rifle shot. They ignored the air horn, the whistle, and the quiet controls. Even more telling, they only flew to the gunshot when White fired inside heavy timber. When he shot in open meadows, where a dead elk and drag marks in the snow are easy to spot from the sky, the birds did not bother reacting to the noise. They only tracked the gunshot into thick forest canopy, where their eyes could not find a carcass and the sound was the only way to pinpoint the meal. White published his findings in the journal *Ecology*, marking the first hard proof of a wild scavenger…