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Brian

Ravens and a Theory of Mind

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They hold a special place in many mythologies.  Clever, opportunistic birds, a group of them is called an unkindness.  So its best to keep your eyes open when they are around.  

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They hold a special place in many mythologies. Clever, opportunistic birds, a group of them is called an unkindness. So its best to keep your eyes open when they are around.

Very similar to crows, a group of which is called a murder.

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The ravens here have a white iris with a blue ring 

 

Australian_Raven,_NSW.JPG

 

 

 

In the juvenile , its all bright blue 

 

CONKGnpl.jpg

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It has long been known that Aboriginals used 'fire stick farming' .  But the use of 'fire twig' hunting by birds of prey is a new one ! 

 

 
Birds of prey are starting fires DELIBERATELY: Kites and falcons are 'intentionally dropping smouldering twigs' to smoke out mice and insects in Australia
  • Researchers have compiled a study of reports of wild birds spreading fires
  • They believe the birds carry burning twigs to unburnt parts of the bush
  • Birds then drop them in a bid to smoke out prey such as insects and mice 
  • Researchers said birds could be 'third force' capable of starting bush fires



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3439042/Birds-prey-starting-fires-DELIBERATELY-Brown-falcon-dropped-smouldering-twigs-Australian-bush-smoke-mice-insects-say-researchers.html#ixzz3zhozNBlx 
 

 

Edited by Nungali

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Very similar to crows, a group of which is called a murder.

That I knew.

 

 

 
Birds of prey are starting fires DELIBERATELY: Kites and falcons are 'intentionally dropping smouldering twigs' to smoke out mice and insects in Australia
  • Researchers have compiled a study of reports of wild birds spreading fires
  • They believe the birds carry burning twigs to unburnt parts of the bush
  • Birds then drop them in a bid to smoke out prey such as insects and mice 
  • Researchers said birds could be 'third force' capable of starting bush fires

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3439042/Birds-prey-starting-fires-DELIBERATELY-Brown-falcon-dropped-smouldering-twigs-Australian-bush-smoke-mice-insects-say-researchers.html#ixzz3zhozNBlx 

 

That is WTF. 

I was always warned

it'd be the damn dirty apes

that did us in.

 

Time to start an immigration embargo on Australians and there bad ass birds.  :o

Edited by thelerner

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Weird true story that fits into the offbeat of this forum.

 

I have a tendency to natural, mystical experiences. But I have only had one "omen" in my life.

 

I used to think that an omen was just a thing people claimed, like some psychic prediction. That someone saw XYZ, and they thought to themselves, "Oh this probably means such-and-such" or whatever. Or that they were superstitious, so they'd see a certain thing they culturally had been 'trained' to believe meant something, and decide it was an omen of something.

 

I didn't know that a genuine Omen is a mystical experience. When you have it, you KNOW it. You understand a lot about it right then. It is not just a casual feeling. It is not an intellectual assumption. It is a mystical experience that seems very disturbing yet real.

 

OK so here is the experience:

 

It's somewhere in the early 2000's. I am sleeping peacefully. I'm a single mom so I'm living with just my small girl. I have at that moment something like eight cats, a couple of whom don't get along with the others at all so they don't hang out together, and it is wintertime, so it's snowing.

 

The cats have a door in the window of the back room, and leading up to it is a plastic children's slide from a big 'cube' toy I'd had for my kid when she was just a bit younger. The slide and winter = utter hilarity at times. The cats would run up the slide toward the window -- it was covered with frozen snow -- get this fabulous look on their face, extend their claws fully, and then sliiiiiiiide back down it. I know it was cruel, but I swear I used to laugh until I almost peed my pants about it, it was just so funny. Suffice to say that getting back in the house was harder than getting out for them, so most the time they were inside. And the cat door was actually barely big enough for a couple of the big male cats.

 

(When they were outside, one day I was out in the backyard and they all ran across the frozen-snow ground. It was like half a dozen cats "galloping across the frozen tundra." What an awesome sound! I didn't know cats galloped until then.)

 

Anyway all that is just background.

 

I am woken up at some ungodly hour by all this noise I can't understand. Something just outside the back room I thought at first, as I came awake, but then it sounds like it's in the house. It sounds like the cats doing something crazy as that many of them in one house has a tendency to bring on, a few cats in motion at once when playing can knock over anything. I get up, and I'm probably still like 50% asleep, and I stumble to my bedroom door which is half-closed, and I open the door and step into the hall.

 

And I stop and stare. Because right there in the hallway, in front of my door but back a foot, is the largest freshly dead black bird I have ever seen. I am so half-awake that I freeze and spend some time letting the shock wake up my brain in case I'm imagining some of this. We get a lot of crows in Winter passing through, but this is like the mother of all crows, so it's either literally some kind of mutant giant crow, or it's an actual raven. I'm no expert so I don't know, but I consider this as I stare down at it.

 

Then I realize that all my cats are sitting there in the hallway -- all of them, even the ones that don't get along with the others -- surrounding it weirdly, like a circle almost but not quite as there isn't room in the hallway -- looking at me.

 

Then I realize that in order to get this gigantic dead bird into the house, ALL the cats had to collectively work together to drag it UP the frozen slide and in through the cat window it probably barely even fit through at all, and then drag it across the room and down the hall to in front of my bedroom door.

 

However, all these thoughts in series, were only the intellectual part. Because from the instant I stepped into my bedroom doorway and looked down, I had this overwhelming FEELING:

 

This was "a message" to me.

It was what my people would call "an omen."

This was the first of three messages that I would be given.

Each one would be a sign of the continuing 'development' of something in my world.

The large probability for it now existed.

If the third message arrived, it was sure.

 

And whatever that was, was not a good thing. It was a bad thing. I mean like "the doom of my...." -- country? perhaps -- level bad thing. I didn't feel like the planet or my species would end. I didn't feel like it meant my life or house or even city. But it seemed like a really BIG doom that might fit with how I might interpret "my country" -- given a strong degree of patriotism (early childhood indoctrination in school worked really well for me).

 

And I felt the bird, its size, its death, the cats, everything, were part of some equation, some song, some complex symbol, that could have told me something about this potential except I was oblivious to it, so I didn't know what it meant.

 

Only that it did have MEANING. It wasn't merely a chance, coincidental event.

 

I stood there staring at the bird dead at my feet, at the cats, silently for awhile. Then finally I went out and found a box big enough to fit the bird in, put it in and for lack of any idea what else to do, said a sort of prayer over it, closed up the box, and the next day called the animal control guy who came and got the box.

 

OK so this was really weird, right. But I kinda forgot about it after awhile. I had lived here for about two years at that time and I had worked like 120 hours a week doing programming mostly so I was really living in a cave and didn't know anybody besides my dad, a slightly crazy (rather ditzy) aunt, grandmother and my kid.

 

So it's a long time later. I'm thinking now maybe a year later but I honestly don't remember. Long enough that I had forgotten the incident as far as thinking about it goes, though I'd written it down for online friends at the time it happened.

 

My aunt, whose landscaping team mowed my lawn weekly, stops by to see me. I'm sitting in the living room folding laundry and she sits down and volunteers, "I had such a weird dream last night!" And she tells me her dream.

 

There are these two cats, like house cats, she says. One is very large. The other is very small, and tabby striped, like that grey one you have. Except it's actually sort of blood red shades, not grey, an impossible color for a cat. And something happens, and then the small red tabby literally consumes the large cat. And it's sitting there, and the tail of the larger cat is hanging out of its mouth, like it swallowed it whole.

 

And some part of me I had not experienced since that night in the hall suddenly activated the moment she had begun talking and was telling me:

 

This is the second message you are being given.

 

I understood it implicitly, that this was the 2nd of 3.

 

The probably was still developing. And I felt this kind of horrible lurching in my gut because I really felt that the possibility of something quite horrid was coming closer.

 

And I was surprised because I didn't know that "someone else's dream" could be part of one's own Omen. I guess I never gave the subject much thought, but that seemed surprising.

 

And while she was telling it to me, I had this overlay of the biblical story of Joseph interpreting the Pharoah's dream, and how the seven emaciated cows eating the seven healthy cows indicated seven years of famine.

 

I wondered in some horror what the small red tabby cat represented in my world, compared to the much larger cat.

 

And then the day went on.

 

It's been probably a dozen years since then. I have never had the third sign.

 

Does that mean it's not going to happen? That probability shifted? Or it just hasn't happened yet? I have no idea. I also didn't know that Omens could come in 'pieces' or stretch out so much or be... potentials, you might say. This is not a topic I ever had an interest in.

 

Well that's my story. Maybe a let down since nothing exciting ever came of it! Yet. Maybe that's a good thing.

 

RC

Edited by redcairo
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P.S. On Ravens:

 

I once knew a guy who knew a guy (...) who worked with them. He said they would be just monstrously intelligent except they had like a 6 second attention span LOL.

 

I once met a real living raven. My dad and I were at this park in Santa Paula California and there were some cages, I have no idea why someone had cages there as it wasn't a zoo but they were rather 'official' looking. We hadn't seen them before. We reached the end of this row, and at the end was this really big cage, probably about ten feet tall and six feet wide and four feet deep. And there is this huge black bird sitting on a branch right in the middle.

 

Dad and I stop in surprise, and after a moment I say, "Wow. Is that a raven like in that movie??" And he says "Yeah, that's a raven."

 

And the raven, in a voice so low it vibrated the marrow of my bones I think, said: Hello there.

 

I swear me and dad both nearly fainted. If we'd been cartoon characters, our eyes would have rolled up in our heads, our toes would have lifted and we'd have gone straight over backward. We laughed so much later! We were both AGOG. Neither of us had any idea that Ravens can talk!!

 

Ultra-bass. Wow.

 

Edited to add: I forgot until I hit send that actually a friend in high school who had an aviary, had a raven that lived in a big cage outside her kitchen window. Her mom and the bird were half in love. She always kept the window open when in the kitchen (which she was a lot) and the bird hung around inside. To me it looked like "a very big crow" though they said it was a raven. They told me that it was intelligent and that a couple times when her mom was afraid of an intruder, she opened the window, because they had seen from the bird's behavior that if anyone ever even seemed like they would attack her mom, it would totally attack them.

Edited by redcairo
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