- [!] Status - status-updated:: completed 2021-08-18 _Gregarious_ is the origin story of the Maehlorn tree, which in my _Verraine_ universe provides for most of the needs of the Voldshee people, who live in a great mountain range along the north side of the Isle of Maehlorn. The inner bark is a useful fiber for textiles. Both the fruits and nuts are edible, and the roots can be brewed into a medicinal tea. The timber grows straight and true, is resistant to rot and insects, and is sturdy enough for furniture but soft enough to carve. But that's enough about fantasy trees; let's talk about real-life ravens. Ravens are the namesake of [my local football team](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/) and the subject of [my favorite poem](https://poets.org/poem/raven); when my son was a very young infant I used to read it to him over and over again in the middle of the night; I'd almost managed to memorize it by the time he finally started sleeping in a crib. Most of the books I had on my phone were hard to read out loud, and 18th century poetry just flows better in my opinion. So I have a soft spot for ravens. But ravens are also pretty unique from a "domestication" perspective. Ravens, like dolphins, are not technically domesticated, but they frequently make themselves useful to humans even when they haven’t even been tamed. From the raven’s perspective, humans aren’t even unique partners; they’re pretty happy to team up with any large meat-eating mammal. It turns out the curved tip of the raven's beak is super awesome a lots of tasks that require dexterity, but moderately terrible at piercing the skin of a dead mammal, even one as small as a squirrel. Ravens are omnivorous, but they mostly eat meat. They'll hunt rodents and the eggs or hatchlings of other birds, but most of their diets come from scavenged meat. Ravens are known for pecking off the eyes and noses and lips of corpses mostly because that's all they can get to on their own; they need a partner, preferably a carnivorous mammal with the ability to open up a carcass using tools, teeth or claws. Ravens don't much care whether they're aided by humans, canines or bears, they'll signal the presence of a corpse to be scavenged regardless. The relationship between ravens and wolves is so deeply embedded into their natures that ravens and wolves are comfortable in each other's presence even when the wolf was raised in captivity and had never met a raven before. Since ravens are _not_ similarly comfortable in the presence of other large carnivores, there's speculation that wolves were either the raven's first partner or their best; wolves may protect ravens from challenges by other birds and predators. It's not a one-way relationship. Coyotes, for example, rely on ravens for winter eating, because the snow impedes their ability to scavenge on their own. Coyotes are prone to digging up raven food caches to survive winter, and ravens will often act as scouts for hunters. When they find a bunch of prey animals they'll start calling out in excitement to attract hunters. The ancient Irish believed that a raven's calls could predict the future; evidently this power of augury was one of the reasons that Athene was said to have hated them. Humans, have seen their relationship with ravens degrade over time; our hunter-gatherer ancestors probably viewed them as welcome friends, but as populations ballooned with agriculture, ravens came to be associated not with successful hunts but rather with war. Ravens feeding on the carrion of battlefields, or the unburied corpses during plague times, would have emphasized the scavenging nature of the raven. _Gregarious_ is a reminder that scavengers can be good and useful friends, even when they don't submit to our leadership like the rest of our domesticated companions. ## Further Reading - [[A Storytelling of Ravens by Betty Wheelwright]] - [[All the Things That Trees Can Be]]