Rating: 
Summary: An Ornithologist Without a Plan
Review: A better title might be "Fooling Around with Ravens" or "All My Raven Experiments That Went Wrong," or, perhaps, "Why A Scientist Must Be Smarter Than His Subject." This isn't science. It's not even natural history, since most of the behavior he views is the result of his own, contrived experiments. Where his first book, _Ravens in Winter_, was a specific study of a specific problem, this books describes a series of lame experiments, a sort of "seat of the pants" approach to biology. It doesn't work. I live in interior Alaska and ravens are a part of the environment. They are clever, adaptable and resilient animals. Those that have habituated to cities prefer dumpsters behind fast food restaurants over any other kind, MacDonalds best of all. The incredible range of sounds they can make approaches the uncanny. And to see one on a streetlight at -50, a dim shape in the ice fog, is to understand a part of what makes both ravens and Alaska special. But as much as I love ravens, this book does little to help me or anyone else understand them. This is dabbling. There is a real science of the Corvids, the family of birds of which the Common Raven is a member. To learn about ravens, try the real stuff.
Rating: 
Summary: An Entertaining and Enlightening Book
Review: A delightful book, "Mind of the Raven" takes the reader into the life of a truly amazing bird. Professor Heinrich writes more than just statistical trends: he brings us on a journey that makes us feel as though we know these birds personally. The book includes the results of Heinrich's studies, his personal interpretations and many, many wonderful stories about Heinrich's relationships with these birds. This is a very personal book, and goes beyond watching from a distance. Some scientists from certain schools of thought may find the book to be poor science. I couldn't disagree more. In a time when behaviorists are admitting that animals are conscious creatures, and the studies of animal behavior and cognitive psychology are slowly becoming one, Heinrich presents some fresh looks and new, creative methods to study animal minds. One can never truly know an animal until one is able to know what it knows, and why it feels that it does what it does. Bernd Heinrich certainly doesn't have all the answers - nor does he claim to - but he brings us as close to this kind of understanding as anybody possibly could. Dr. Heinrich, despite what critics say, keep up the wonderful work that you do. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but someday, this sort of research will be crucial to animal behavior/psychology studies, and you will have been one a small few who helped to usher it in. I highly recommend this book!
Rating:
Summary: An Entertaining and Enlightening Book
Review: A delightful book, "Mind of the Raven" takes the reader into the life of a truly amazing bird. Professor Heinrich writes more than just statistical trends: he brings us on a journey that makes us feel as though we know these birds personally. The book includes the results of Heinrich's studies, his personal interpretations and many, many wonderful stories about Heinrich's relationships with these birds. This is a very personal book, and goes beyond watching from a distance. Some scientists from certain schools of thought may find the book to be poor science. I couldn't disagree more. In a time when behaviorists are admitting that animals are conscious creatures, and the studies of animal behavior and cognitive psychology are slowly becoming one, Heinrich presents some fresh looks and new, creative methods to study animal minds. One can never truly know an animal until one is able to know what it knows, and why it feels that it does what it does. Bernd Heinrich certainly doesn't have all the answers - nor does he claim to - but he brings us as close to this kind of understanding as anybody possibly could. Dr. Heinrich, despite what critics say, keep up the wonderful work that you do. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but someday, this sort of research will be crucial to animal behavior/psychology studies, and you will have been one a small few who helped to usher it in. I highly recommend this book!
Rating:
Summary: Trust the Reviews!
Review: As (obviously) a raven enthusiast, I stumbled on this book a few months ago. The bookseller mentioned that this book was very popular (for reasons she seemed to not understand). Well I do now! I thoroughly enjoyed Henrichs blend of of his own scientific research and collection of myths, legends, ancedotes and observations about a bird that captured my imagination while working in SE Alaska for a summer. Ravens are fascinating, enigmatic and amazing. This book is a wonderful in depth exploration of ravens book for any nature lover.
Rating: 
Summary: Gotta love this raving naturalist
Review: Bernd applies his multi-faceted brand of research to a species that is clearly close to his heart: the raven, with spectacular results. He weaves anecdotes and scientific studies together flawlessly to draw conclusions that are hard to argue with, if only because he refuses to draw unwarranted conclusions when the evidence isn't clear. He personally studies ravens in his northeastern home area, in Alaska, and in Germany to note the differences between different populations of the animal. He draws extensively on his observations from his own aviary, where it seems he is at times obsessively painstaking in recording nuances of behavior that would fly over the heads of the average bird owner.
The Good and the Bad:
This book has been done right, with a real attempt to keep the reader's interest without compromising the scientific value of the work. The information given is enough to be compelling without being too boring about statistics. The end of the book gets a little more tilted towards hard science, with a fairly in-depth discussion about what warrants consciousness and intelligence, but there's no other conclusion that would be appropriate. On the bad side, there are very occasional forays into self-indulgence, as when he takes the opportunity to argue the comments of a peer reviewer who contributed to the rejection of the publication of his study, or when a not-so-funny joke is recounted.
What I learned:
The raven is a remarkable animal, and consciousness evolves for as much of a specific reason as anything else. One bird might be given all of the instinct necessary to operate within a very narrow range of activity, but shorted on additional brain tissue, which is costly to maintain. But the raven has developed to develop food gathering skills through problem-solving, which allows it to be much more flexible in its approach to food gathering, social interactions, and defense. This hardwired ability to solve problems manifests itself as curiosity, a desire to play, and the ability to visualize consequences without actually performing the action; this last is the most compelling criterion for awareness.
Other interesting raven facts: They can count to as high as seven. They hunt items ranging from ground squirrels to baby seals, but subsist mostly on the carrion provided by bigger predators. They lack the physical ability to pierce skin, and so have to eat through natural body openings or wounds. They have a collaborative relationship with other predators, generally wolves, which results in the ravens possibly directing the wolves to a kill so that they can take their share. This has a strange effect where they're actually uncomfortable eating from a carcass that lacks a predator as a feeding partner. This relationship has been transferred to other species where wolves are scarce, ranging from human hunters to polar bears to, possibly a cougar, which seemed to be led to a human by a raven hoping to feast on the aftermath of a human kill. The problem-solving abilities were best demonstrated by the fact that a raven, when confronted with a piece of meat dangling from a string, will pull the string up by degrees so that it can reach the meat.
Rating:
Summary: an artful piece on the science of ravens
Review: Heinrich has managed a comprehensive and entertaining book on the behavior, biology and indeed, mind of the raven. His book expresses his struggles as a scientist to have what evidence he has abt the behaviour of these "wolf birds", accepted by the scientific community which continues to be conservative. Expect to learn all and more you ever dared to ask about ravens. Heinrich's studies of ravens are long term and an accumulation of information fed from individuals who are simply curious about the birds to those who've spent their academic lives researching them the world over. Additionally, Mind of the Raven allows a personal take and comment on the birds, some with names, others named in realtion to their tags. Otherwise, you will find that Henrich has very beautifully incorporated a reflection of the human behaviour and the misgivings of our existing scientific community whilst studying his feathered subjects. I've never had contact with a raven. Heinrich's book is certainly motivating me to meet one soon. You'd want to read this whether or not you're into birds.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Quite Stellar
Review: I found this book to be fun to read at times, and I enjoyed learning about this interesting bird. But I found too many loose ends, where Mr. Heinrich gave up on a study before he finished it. A simple remotely controlled video camera would have helped him immensely in his study of wild ravens, but yet, he seemed to never use one and kept accidentally scaring them off. This is one scientist in need of an assistant to cover his works in progress when he has to attend other things. Several times, he mentioned studies that were ruined because he had to leave. All I can say is; I hope he gets more funding or finds someone to help him. He seems to have made some inroads in understanding ravens, it would be sad if this is all he did with his studies.
Rating:
Summary: Really Cool Book!!
Review: I'm a 14-year-old 8th grader, and you know how hard it is to please teenagers when it comes to this sort of book!! I LOVE this book... it's helped convince me I'm going to study ornithology (birds) in college!! The book gives the reader a good look into the minds of ravens, and has some ammusing accounts of some of the things ravens have done. It gives a good idea of how ravens live, how they get along with other animals, how they are in captivity, and explains IN DETAIL the steps to the experiments involved in acquiring the information. I think this is REALLY important because it gives you a reason to believe what is being said. It's not like other books that just give you the information and that's it. I recommend this book to bird fanatics in particular, but I also think that almost anyone would enjoy it!!
Rating:
Summary: Learn so much
Review: I'm glad I read this book learned a lot of fascinating about ravens
Rating:
Summary: Intriguing Investigations into the Lives and Minds of Ravens
Review: In "Mind of the Raven", biologist Bernd Heinrich delves into the behavior of ravens as individuals who might have a conscious choice, as opposed to taking a strictly behavioral ecologist perspective of those behaviors as being simply the results of evolutionary necessity. Heinrich strives to share the insight into the world of ravens which he gained over the course of nearly a decade of studying and interacting with ravens, both wild and captive, at his Vermont and Maine homes. "Mind of the Raven" isn't confined to the birds' intelligence or consciousness, although chapters on these fascinating and controversial subjects are included. The "mind" of the book's title encompasses all behavior and experience in these birds' lives. Heinrich details innumerable observations and experiments which he conducted on the subjects of raven feeding and educating their young, cooperation, hunting, adoption, dominance, sensory perception, individual recognition, communication, fears, interaction with other animals, caching, deception, play, intelligence, and emotions. Heinrich seems to possess an insatiable -and infectious- curiosity about these magnificent birds, which is demonstrated in his exhausting and endlessly inventive experiments. Heinrich's studies are as controlled and straightforward as possible. And although they sometimes raise more questions than they answer, they never fail to entertain or to impress the reader with the complexity and variety of raven personalities. It's nice to read a book by a scientist who has such an enthusiasm for his field of study, as well as genuine affection for his subjects. "Mind of the Raven" is a very readable broad account of the lives and minds of these large, clever corvids that have so populated human folklore and experience for thousands of years. I recommend it to any bird-lover, and those who have occasion to observe ravens will find Bernd Heinrich's insights especially interesting.
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