Music plays a large part in a birds life. They sing it. They listen to it. They have favorites. And those of you who have ever been outside and heard a bird sing you know they love it. But there are birds who can’t sing. Through some horrible genetic accident they can’t sing a note. Like these ravens. They can’t sing and when they try they all sound like Tom Waits after a night at the piano and a carton of Lucky Strikes. So what do they do? They’re birds. Music is their life.

Many choose to do something completely different. Ravens have a rep for being really smart, like Mensa smart, and they are incredible problem solvers. One time I was in Yellowstone, in the parking lot at Old Faithful Lodge and a whole band of bikers had parked their bikes near the entrance and gone in. A raven spent a full 10 minutes figuring out how to unzip the saddlebag on the back of one of the bikes then carefully pulled out what looked like stripper underwear, piece by piece. As it would pull out each piece, each one naughtier than the next, the crowd that had gathered around would let out a cheer. This seemed to encourage the raven to dig deeper and it didn’t stop until every single piece was out of the bag and lying on the ground. There was a Vegas sticker on the back of the bike so I guess whatever happened in Vegas didn’t stay there. In any event it shows that ravens like to be in the limelight.

I had stopped at an overlook to check things out and another car there had their radio playing, loudly, way too loudly for Yellowstone anyway, and as fate would have it Madonna was playing. She was doing that song Vogue and after a few choruses of Strike a Pose this ravens latent musical abilities had to find release somehow. It too began striking a pose and didn’t stop until enough other visitors had threatened to lynch the radio player and he turned the radio off. This just goes to show that you can’t mess with genetics. This raven couldn’t sing but it could let out, that musical expression it had, in the only way it knew. In dance. Sure it was a quiet dance, not very exuberant but not exactly sedate either, but it still allowed it to release that pent-up musical energy we know is in every bird. I just wish the radio playing guy had been playing James Brown’s “I Feel Good” instead. Would that have been cool or what? For those of you who’ve been living under a rock for the last 75 years and don’t know “I Feel Good” here’s what it sounds like.

I bet ravens from all over the park would come to join in.  Now that would be something to see.