Canada must do more to prepare for the next pandemic: CSL Seqirus
iPolitics spoke with Gill Stafford, head of commercial operations for CSL Seqirus, a vaccine manufacturer, to discuss why Canada needs to adopt a more proactive approach to pandemic preparedness, as well as how CSL Seqirus is working to support public health across the globe.
Let’s start with the basics. We recently marked the 5th anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. So, why is pandemic preparedness important for Canadians right now?
Because it is always best to be prepared for emergencies, rather than be caught off guard. We don’t know when, but unfortunately it is likely that COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic that we experience globally.
And Canadians saw first-hand during COVID-19 why it is critically important that we are prepared for whatever comes next. Let’s also not forget the added risks to employment security and the significant impacts on our economy. In the first couple months of COVID-19, we saw cumulative job losses in Canada surpass three million, which is only one example of how pandemics can place a massive burden on national economies.
Public health experts will tell you that the risk of another influenza pandemic is not hypothetical. It’s a statistical certainty. Therefore, it’s best that we are not caught off-guard and that countries are able to respond accordingly.
So, what is your role in helping us prepare?
CSL Seqirus is a global leader in both seasonal and pandemic influenza prevention. Essentially, we demonstrate our leadership through producing both the flu shot you get every year, as well as vaccines that help fight pandemics. Our global manufacturing capacity, which spans several continents, enables us to be agile as we support our customers and public health around the world. We’re driven by a promise we’ve made to protect public health, and we’ve partnered with more than 30 governments globally, all of whom recognize our commitment to fulfilling that promise.
And can you share some examples of efforts CSL Seqirus has taken on pandemic preparedness?
Absolutely. For example, take the recent bird flu outbreak in the U.S., their pandemic preparedness authority has selected us to complete the vaccine manufacturing process to help with the national outbreak and preparedness response.
Elsewhere, we’ve also worked with the European Union’s Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA) to support pre-pandemic procurement of bird flu vaccines in Europe.
In Canada, we’re currently having conversations with federal and provincial governments about how we can do more to help prepare.
The recent outbreak in the U.S. has seen this strain of bird flu cause widespread disease in poultry, which has then spilled over into other mammals, including humans. One person in Louisiana tragically passed away from an avian flu strain, H5N1, earlier this year, which shows that we’ve already reached a critical juncture to take pandemic preparedness more seriously. Last fall, Canada also experienced its first domestically acquired human case of H5N1 avian flu in BC, where the teenager was hospitalized.
With the first human case of the H5N1 avian flu found in Canada recently, what work is being done to combat the transmission and protect Canadians?
In short, I believe that there’s always more to be done.
We look forward to having more discussions with the federal government. Governments of all stripes should ensure that preparing for public health emergencies is appropriately prioritized. We’ve been closely monitoring reports about the recent bird flu outbreak, and we are well-positioned to respond as a trusted partner in public health that is committed to prevention from a future health emergency.
So, what exactly does CSL Seqirus’ relationship with the Canadian government look like? Can you describe that for me?
Absolutely.
We’re proud to be a one of Canada’s pandemic vaccine suppliers. Presently, we have a pandemic preparedness contract with the federal government for a pandemic influenza vaccine which allows us to help Canadians in the event of a healthcare emergency.
We also remain a trusted partner for Canadian authorities on pandemic and seasonal immunization, but we look forward to developing those relationships even more in order to advance various preparedness initiatives and to share our expertise.
Let’s talk about research and development (R&D), which plays an important role in advancing public health. What does CSL Seqirus do regarding R&D in Canada, and how does it contribute to pandemic preparedness?
It’s an excellent question. R&D is crucial to the whole operation. You cannot be prepared for the next pandemic without investing in R&D, and that’s not lost on us.
In Canada, we’ve invested $10.5 million in the past five years to support various R&D initiatives, most of which involve research projects focusing on developing a pipeline of influenza vaccines.
Finally, the big question — do you believe Canada is adequately prepared for a future pandemic? And, if not, what steps do you believe need to be taken?
We are pleased to see that Canada has made progress. Recently the government purchased 500, 000 doses with a manufacturer. Perhaps it’s cliché, but more needs to be done. Additionally, the establishment of the new agency, Health Emergency Readiness Canada, was also an important step to prepare for future pandemics. However, we believe that conversation needs to be more front-of-mind for political leaders and decisionmakers.
The impact of COVID-19 is still freshly ingrained in the minds of millions of Canadians, but we cannot forget the costs I mentioned earlier. Thousands of lives. Billions of dollars. It’s not something anyone would like to live through again, so let’s make sure we’re adequately prepared.
https://play.prx.org/e?sp=all&uf=https%3A%2F%2Fpublicfeeds.net%2Ff%2F12567%2Ffeed-rss.xmlRanchers Jay and Chyenne Smith raise Black Angus cattle near the tiny town of Carmen, Idaho. The ranch is located just over the ridge from one of the original sites of wolf reintroduction, and the Smiths say wolves have killed more than 200 of their cattle in the past 20 years. | (Photo courtesy of Jay and Chyenne Smith)
CARMEN (Idaho Capital Sun) — Idaho rancher Jay Smith has a wolf problem.
Over the last 20 years, Smith said wolves have killed more than 200 of his cattle and caused major financial harm to his family’s business.
“At today’s value at nearly $2,000 a head, times that by 200 and see if we could have invested that money over time what would that have been?” Smith said. “Significant.”
Smith and his wife, Chyenne, raise Black Angus cattle near the town of Carmen, a tiny community near the Continental Divide, just west of the Montana border.
Jay grew up nearby; his family has been ranching in the area since 1924.
Last year, the family celebrated its centennial on the land.
But their history goes back even longer.
Smith has a family history book documenting cattle ownership back to the 1600s.
“So my family’s cattle raising lineage goes way back,” Smith said.
There’s something else that goes way back in Smith’s family: Warnings about wolves that have been passed down through the generations.
Idaho rancher ‘got to be a cowboy every day’ of his life
The J Lazy S Angus Ranch is situated in a green valley set in the shadows of high mountain peaks, some of which rise above 10,000 feet.
Wildfire smoke often hangs in the air during the summer. And on the other side of the valley, the Salmon River cuts through the landscape.
The ranch features a classic red barn, a horse corral, an assortment of farm machinery and a renovated old cabin surrounded by shade trees.
They have a small herd of Morgan-Quarter Horse crossbreeds and an array of cattle dogs that go everywhere with the Smiths, including high up in the surrounding mountains.
“One of the main reasons Chyenne and I bought this place is A, because ranching is in my blood,” Smith said. “But B, it’s exactly how we wanted to raise our children. I wanted them to have the work ethic and the animal husbandry background that I grew up with. I think it’s very important.”
Running cattle and working the ranch is all he’s ever known, and Smith wouldn’t trade it for anything.
“I don’t know if you ever watch TV, but I got to be a cowboy every day of my life, so I don’t know how you go wrong there,” Smith said. “(There is) a lot of freedom. These ranches are big, and so we had a lot of private property where us kids could go a long ways without getting in trouble or being in the wrong spot. And I don’t know how a city kid could ever get their head around that, but we could literally go for miles and not be somewhere we shouldn’t be.”
Ranching and living in wolf ground zero
The Smiths’ several hundred cattle have a lot of room to roam, too.
During summers, the cows live in the high country. They spend 12 to 16 weeks each in a cow camp way up in the mountains, roaming far and wide on public land.
And that’s where they run into trouble with wolves.
Only a few ridgelines separate Smith’s ranch from wolf ground zero: one of the original sites of reintroduction 30 years ago – Corn Creek in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.
From their porch on the ranch, Jay and Chyenne Smith can see the Diamond Moose Grazing allotment, where wolves have a track record killing and harassing livestock, Smith said.
“It’s been one of the most consistently conflicted allotments throughout the years,” Smith said.
Jay Smith was 22 years old in 1995 when the government reintroduced wolves. He has seen ranching before wolves were reintroduced and the difference the animals made after they were reintroduced.
“We worked really hard to keep (reintroduction) from happening,” Smith said. “And then when it became inevitable and we could see the writing on the wall, then we started trying to position ourselves for how to live with the inevitable. It was coming. We’ve been here 100 years. We’re not leaving. So now how do we make this work?”
Idaho rancher affected by wolf depredation says compensation hard to come by
Not only do the wolves literally eat into their business, but every time the Smiths or other ranchers speak out or try to do something about it, they say they are vilified.
“The negativity and the hate towards ranchers is worse than the wolves, in my opinion, and it’s because the public’s been fed this fairy tale of what wolves are,” Chyenne Smith said. “And we’re the bad guys in every one of those stories.”
Jay Smith said he hasn’t seen a nickel in compensation for the livestock wolves killed.
“We have been paid for zero head ever,” he said.
Although Smith said he hasn’t been paid for any of his livestock losses, other Idaho ranchers have.
The state of Idaho has a compensation program to reimburse livestock owners the fair market value of animals that are killed by wolves or grizzly bears.
It applies to cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, chicken, llamas and even bees – basically any animal used for food or in food production.
From 2014 to 2022, the state of Idaho’s livestock compensation program paid out $687,029.50 to 299 different livestock producers for compensation for verified livestock losses, state records show.
But to be paid, livestock owners must have a confirmed wolf kill claim filed with the Office of Species Conservation each year.
“In the topography we run in, we can’t find them in time,” Smith said. “They just simply don’t come home. We’ll find a pile of bones. We’ll find wolf scat right on top of those bones. I mean, we know what happened to them. But as far as Wildlife Services coming in and being able to make a confirmation report to send to the Office of Species Conservation to put us in the reimbursement program, we are zero for 200. That’s our batting average.”
State records show that most investigations of wolf complaints don’t conclude that wolves were definitely responsible.
From July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, Idaho Wildlife Services investigated 99 complaints of livestock losses blamed on wolves, state records show. About 28% of those investigations ruled wolves’ responsibility for livestock deaths were “confirmed” or “probable.”
But more than two-thirds of the wolf complaints, about 68%, were classified as “possible/unknown.” In some cases, wolves may have eaten the carcass of livestock after the animal was already dead but did not kill the animal.
Smith said his losses add up.
“We have lost over 200 head of livestock in that 20-plus years to wolves,” Jay Smith said.
“One year we’ll lose 20 head of cattle, and one year we’ll lose zero,” he added. “And we just never quite know how to explain or how to do better, or how to mitigate that risk. It’s very variable, and it’s very unknown. But it’s remained over the years. It hasn’t gone away. It sounds like it’s come and gone, but the wolves are still back there.”
And even if wolves don’t kill livestock like cows and sheep, even the presence of wolves can distress animals enough that they aren’t as healthy and wouldn’t be worth as much at market.
But wolf supporters say the number of livestock killed is extremely low. In Idaho, Montana and Wyoming wolves are confirmed to have killed an average of less than 300 domestic animals per year – out of 6 million cows and sheep in those states.
But even if the overall numbers and percentages are low, the cost is high for the farming and ranching families like the Smiths.
With 30 years of experience since reintroduction and all the claims made by wolf advocates and all the meetings with the feds, nothing has changed Smith’s mind about wolves.
He opposed reintroducing wolves, and now that they are here, Smith thinks there are too many of them. As a result, he thinks ranchers should be given broad authority to kill wolves to protect their livestock.
And as the chairman of his local county’s Republican Party central committee, Smith has helped make that happen. He said he co-wrote a 2021 state law that helped make it easier to kill more wolves by expanding when and how they can be hunted and trapped.
The law allows hunters to purchase an unlimited number of wolf tags to kill wolves and makes trapping on private land legal year round.
“There’s still people vehemently against every proposal we have,” Smith said. “And I don’t know why. We’re not out to kill them all. We’re just out to make a living and keep our livelihoods.”
Chyenne Smith agreed.
“It’s about not being able to do everything we can to protect what’s ours when we need to,” she said.
The role trapping plays in the wolf v. livestock debate
When there are problems with wolves harassing or killing livestock, ranchers often call on trappers to catch the predators.
And one of the best people at trapping wolves is Rusty Kramer.
He’s the president of the Idaho Trappers Association and the incoming president of the National Trappers Association.
Whether it’s badgers, beavers, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, muskrats or wolves, if it’s legal to trap in Idaho, Kramer has probably caught it.
Depending on the animals, he’s used scent lures, bait or even blind set traps, hoping to entice an animal to step on a silver dollar-sized pan, which triggers the trap’s jaws to lose around the wolf’s foot and seize hold.
Once a wolf is trapped, Kramer shoots it behind the shoulder with his .22 magnum pistol, killing it. Since wolves were reintroduced, he’s trapped and killed 25 to 30.
Kramer was born and raised in Fairfield, Idaho, near the Sawtooth National Forest in central Idaho.
“I just learned how to trap looking over my dad’s shoulder and riding around with him and just kind of fell in love with it as a kid and I’ve been doing it ever since,” Kramer said.
It started as damage control, trapping ground squirrels and marmots, also known as rock chucks, to protect the alfalfa. Later, he moved on to coyotes and muskrats.
Kramer’s father taught him how to process and sell the pelts, stressing the importance of using every part of the animal. As a kid, the pelts put a little extra money in his pocket.
For him, trapping is a way of life and a family tradition.
Today, Kramer said the Idaho Trappers Association runs the largest fur sale in the United States, in Glenns Ferry, where a trapper can make good money for a wolf pelt.
A quality wolf pelt can go for $500 or more.
For 10 years as an adult, Kramer lived in Boise – the state’s largest city – about a 90-minute drive from Fairfield. After Micron Technology laid him off, Kramer returned to Fairfield.
But it’s tough to make a living on trapping alone, and Kramer also runs an alfalfa farm and is the watermaster for his local water district.
It’s the farm where Kramer and other farmers run into trouble with wolves. Ever since wolves came back, Kramer says, a lot more elk are hanging out in the valley where he and many other farmers grow alfalfa. He says the elk hang out there to keep safe from wolves, who tend to avoid agricultural areas because of the human presence. The elk trample the fields and eat the alfalfa, creating a headache and a cost for Rusty.
“I don’t hate wolves,” Kramer said. “I very (much) admire wolves. How far they can roam and how cunning they are and survive out there.”
But he thinks it was a mistake to reintroduce wolves to Idaho.
“I’m under the opinion it would be cool to snap your fingers and it’s back to ‘Dances with Wolves’ days,” Kramer said, referring to the 1990 movie starring Kevin Costner. “You know, where it’s buffalo from Ohio to Oregon and grizzlies and wolves. But there’s only so many places that grizzlies, wolves and buffalo can have in the 21st century, because they just roam so far. These aren’t foxes and coyotes that can live around humans.”
“There’s just not enough space for them in the 21st century, in my opinion,” Kramer said.
Does Idaho’s Wood River Wolf Project offer a solution to protecting livestock from wolves?
Suzanne Asha Stone is trying to to demonstrate that ranchers can live side-by-side with wolves today.
Thirty years ago, Stone was an intern working on the wolf reintroduction project. Since then, she’s become a prominent wolf expert and advocate.
She is the executive director of the International Wildlife Coexistence Network and a co-founder of the Wood River Wolf Project in Idaho.
Lately, Stone has been focusing on helping ranchers protect sheep and cattle without killing wolves.
Stone said the catalyst for the work was a “train wreck” of conflict between wolves and sheep in 2007 in central Idaho’s Blaine County.
Unaware that wolves were denning with pups in the area, a rancher let out his flock of sheep with some livestock guardian dogs for protection, Stone said.
“So to wolves, having those dogs come in meant that they had strange wolves coming in and were a significant threat to their pups,” Stone said. “The rancher, of course, didn’t know this. He had no idea that the wolves were there. But within 24 hours, we had dead sheep, dead livestock guardian dogs and a (wolf) pack with a death warrant on their head.”
Stone said the community came together after the event to look for a way to project sheep and wolves.
“It was at that time that the residents of Blaine County pushed back hard and said, ‘We really enjoy having wolves here. We had our own little Yellowstone happening right in our backyard, where we could go out and watch these wolves and their pups, and we want to keep them alive,’” Stone said.
From there, Stone sat down at the table with ranchers in the area, as well as an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services.
Stone said just about everyone was skeptical, even wolf biologists who wanted to keep more wolves alive.
“And so we sat down with all of them and then reached out to the ranchers and just said, ‘Let us try these nonlethal tools. Now everybody’s telling us we’re going to fail, but let’s try and see what happens,’” Stone said.
Stone started using something called fladry.
It’s nothing more than a barrier of waving flags, but it has proven successful to deter wolves in Eastern Europe and help sell high-mileage Hondas stateside.
“It looks like the flagging that sits around used car lots, basically,” Stone said. “It doesn’t look intimidating to us at all. Wolves don’t like it. They don’t trust it. And so we were able to keep the sheep behind those fladry pens for the rest of the season without having a single other loss. And the wolves were right there raising their pups for a good part of that summer. No more incidents at all.”
Stone’s critics called it beginner’s luck and questioned whether she could replicate her results over long periods of time or large areas.
That led to the creation of the Wood River Wolf Project, which for the last 17 summers has been partnering with ranchers in the area to use non-lethal tools and techniques to protect sheep from wolves.
The project area covers about 4,600 square miles of rugged, mountainous terrain.
Stone says there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to wolf conflicts – different terrain, different predator behavior, even varying access to electricity can affect what works. So, she’ll try just about anything – and her group has over the years. They’ve used lights, blasted air horns and played recordings to scare wolves away.
In one case, wolves were feasting on llamas at an eastern Oregon ranch. So Stone’s team set up those 20-foot air dancers you see at car lots and lit them up at night.
“So when the wolves came over the top of the hill, they saw this enormous monster up there flapping around and making all kinds of noise, and oh my gosh, they were in the next county the next day,” she said.
“We’ve only lost two wolves in the 17 years now of the project and an average of less than five sheep a year for that entire 17-year period,” Stone said. “So it’s the lowest loss of livestock to wolves in any area where wolves and livestock overlap in the Western United States, probably beyond that. It’s a very successful project, and we use less money than what they do to kill wolves outside of the project area, where they’re losing more livestock there.”
But Stone hasn’t convinced everyone. In fact, one key holdout is her own state government.
Even when nonlethal methods of wolf control are available, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game’s written policy preference is to kill wolves to reduce the overall wolf population in the state.
“A lot of what we’ve learned here is being applied in countries all over the world, just not in the state of Idaho, and not to any real extent beyond our project area, because the state is so determined to kill wolves rather than to live with them,” Stone said.
ACOUPLE OF RAVENS have been shouting at each other across the garden each day this spring-into-summer, and their loud-mouthed antics reminded me of a somewhat less bawdy conversation about crows and ravens that I had a decade ago on the podcast with ornithologist Dr. John Marzluff—a conversation I want to reprise.
Possessing large brains for their body size, a knack for social networking that requires no internet connection, and keen powers of observation, crows and ravens are among the big personalities of the bird word.
They are also what Dr. Marzluff calls, “black-feathered practitioners of lifelong learning,” and from him I learned about the capacity of their avian brains and the range of things it allows them to do–from the funny to the daring, much of it almost unbelievable.
Dr. Marzluff is a renowned ornithologist and urban ecologist, and professor emeritus of wildlife sciences at the University of Washington. He is author a number of books, including ones about his area of particular expertise, the corvids—crows, ravens, jays and their relatives. Around the time that we recorded this conversation, I had just read the book he created in collaboration with illustrator Tony Angell called “Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans” (affiliate link), which was the subject of our 2015 discussion.
Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page for a chance to win a copy of “Gifts of the Crow.”
Read along as you listen to the July 7, 2025 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
Q. It has been raining here today. We haven’t had much rain in the Northeast lately, though I know you’ve been having crazy, crazy rain in the Pacific Northwest.
A. It is very, very wet.
Q. Looking out the window today, I was thinking: How do birds stay dry, anyway? There is always a question about the birds; I have infinite questions about them.
A. They’ve got, fortunately, very nice oil glands, and they just coat themselves with a sheen of oil and most of the rain just beads right off of their back and rolls off.
Q. Smart bird—or well-built birds.
The corvids—the crows, the ravens. I love these birds, and consider it a treat when a flock of crows come calling or a raven leaves its distinctive tracks in the snow.
I suppose I have to ask the boring question first: Who’s who? How do we tell crow and ravens apart?
A. The raven is a much bigger cousin of the crow. They’re in the same genus [Corvus], and so they are closely related and share a lot of characteristics because of that. But the voice is the easiest characteristic. If you can hear them, the crow is mainly going to caw, and the raven is going to quark, and drip like a faucet and bark like a dog, and make lots of other sorts of noises.
Q. [Laughter.]
A. Being about twice the size, and having about a 4-foot wingspan, the raven really dwarfs the crow when you see them side by side. Its tail is also more shaped like a diamond, and it’s got more of a beard around its throat from its lanceolate feathers there.
Q. I feel like I see crows in numbers, and ravens in onesies and twosies. Is that an incorrect assumption, or a characteristic?
A. That’s quite characteristic. Ravens and crows both mate and form monogamous, lifelong pair bonds, but the raven quickly kicks its kid out of the territory and the pair patrols that territory. [Laughter.] You typically just see the pair.
Q. Is the raven our largest songbird?
A. It’s the largest songbird in the world. Technically it’s a songbird because of complex throat musculature that it has.
Q. It has a syrinx?
A. All birds have a syrinx. It has a junction box there between the two branches of the bronchi that go to the lungs, and it’s where the voice is produced. But the thing that the songbirds have that the others don’t are very complex muscles that wrap around that syrinx so that it can warp and pull and stretch in so many ways to make such a variable amount of noise.
Q. Interesting. The subheading of the book “Gifts of the Crow” reads, “How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans.” A number of times as I was reading the book I was flashing on a National Geographic series from a few years ago called “Monkey Thieves” about the troupes of rhesus macaque monkeys of Jaipur, India, and thinking these corvids remind me of those monkeys! [Laughter.]
In fact in the book you do note several aspects of avian cognition seen in these birds that scientists had thought for a long time only humans and some monkeys possessed–like insight, for instance.
A. Insight has always been one of the hallmarks of primates. The idea here is that you can look at a problem and intuit the solution, basically see the steps that are required to solve this problem. So imagine food hanging from a string, or buried in a tube you cannot reach. You might start thinking, “How can I position that tube, or could I use a tool to get at that food that’s in there?”
Monkeys of course will solve that problem, but crows do as well. Depending on the species, some, like the New Caledonian crow would fashion a tool to get that food out—and they do it almost instantly when they see the problem.
Others might drop things into water to raise the level and float food up to them, or use other sorts of advanced techniques to get at the solution to a problem. [Above, New Caledonian crow making a hooked tool from straight piece of wire.]
Q. Amazing. You also say in the book that they can be observers of body language and the intent of other individuals, or other creatures.
A. We did some experiments here with our American crows that live here in Seattle, and they’re quite tame here. You can typically get quite close to them in the city. But if you lunge at them or even if you just look at them as you approach, they are a completely different bird. They’ll stand away, they’ll move away; they understand that you are paying them some attention and therefore it may be good or it may be bad, but they’re not going to take the risk.
Q. Until the 1960s, you write, birds were regarded as simpletons by scientists, like that expression “birdbrain.” You don’t think birdbrain is a slur, do you? [Above, another video example of birds’ ingenuity in making tools.]
A. It’s a compliment of the highest order, to be sure.
Q. In some of the corvids, their brains are particularly large for their body size.
A. It’s important to understand that it is relative to their body size. The brain of a crow is about the size of your thumb, but the bird only weighs less than a pound. So it’s a large brain relative to its body size. Compare it to something like an ostrich—which is the other extreme for a bird. A very big body, but probably not the brightest bird out there. But crows and ravens, their brains are much more for their body size on line with what we would consider the small monkeys to have. They’re really more like a primate in terms of the amount of brainpower they can bring to a problem.
Q. Mammals and birds both trace back to same reptilian brain—we have a common ancestry, don’t we?
A. That’s the one point we try to make in the book. Some of the things you see and how you interpret them do seem fantastic. But it all comes back to the similarity we have in not only our brains, but the particular nerve cells in our brains—the transmitters that allow us to communicate between nerve cells in the brain and form complex memories. That all goes back to this reptilian heritage that mammals and reptiles and birds all share.
Q. So interesting. Did diet—or does diet—have to do with how developed certain of the corvids’ brains have become? Because they love food, don’t they? [Laughter.]
A. It’s involved, and they’ll do anything to get at food.
It’s almost to flip that around a bit: Because they have a large brain they also have to capture a lot of energy every day. So they have to have a high-quality diet, or at least a lot of whatever they’re eating.
The brain is the most expensive organ in the body for us as well as any other vertebrate. It takes a ton of energy, and when you have a big one, you’re sacrificing the need to do other things instead of getting food. You’re sacrificing that and trading it off with the ability to do things very efficiently with that brain.
Q. We’ve been talking about ravens, and crows, and they have other relatives like the jays. Do they have similar diets, or eat distinctive things?
A. They’re very different. I would say that within the corvids in general, and there are about 140 species there, some are extreme specialists. The pinyon jay, for example, eats primarily pine seeds. It stores pine seeds through to the fall to fuel its economy all winter and spring. Other birds like the raven and generalists, and they’ll eat anything that moves or lies around too long [laughter]—they’re going to eat it.
Some are very flexible in diet, and others are very specialized. The interesting thing is that specialization has driven some parts of the brain of these birds to be incredible—like the pinyon jay I mentioned has to remember where it puts all these seeds. So it has a very large hippocampus, part of its brain that’s responsible for spatial memory.
The raven has got to solve lots of different problems and figure lots of different foods out, so it has a large general forebrain.
Q. You write in “Gifts of the Crow” that everyone always has a crow story, and I suspect when you go to cocktail parties everybody wants to tell you theirs.
A. Yes.
Q. [Laughter.] Rather than tell you that I wanted to ask about another corvid I seem to attract a lot, the blue jay—not an unusual bird in my rural spot. One of my peculiarities among many is that because nature always cleans its plate, I waste nothing—including mice from traps in the cellar or barn or shed. I just put them outside, and by the next morning someone takes it away.
The other day I tossed one out onto the lawn, and went inside, and within minutes something caught my eye, and it was a blue jay that came and stabbed at the mouse and pushed it around at it for a minute, then lifted off and left with it. I didn’t realize they were omnivores or carrion eaters.
A. I would say even the most specialized seed eaters—and the blue jay is toward that line, and specializes in acorns for the most part. But even those that are specialized in the corvids, they’ll always take matter like that. They’ll take a small mouse, a small bird, an egg, a small snake or frog. Again kind of getting back to your first point about the quality of the diet, and that’s high energy, high fat and protein that’s coming in with a small animal like that. That really helps them meet their energetic needs.
Q. Last winter I saw a first with the blue jays again, when they pecked light-colored latex paint off my front porch and would disappear with pieces of paint. And eggshells as well, which I put out for them—within moments, they pick them up and fly away with them. Do they have a crop where they can stash things, or a pouch?
A. The blue jay’s got what we call an expandable throat, which can hold a couple of acorns. When you get into something like the Clark’s nutcracker, they have a special pouch that’s a space under their tongue that opens up like a pelican’s pouch, and they can put 150 or so pine seeds in that thing and fly off with it.
So within the corvids you see these different adaptations to their different ways of life, and again the blue jay is more general—so it hasn’t committed all the way to a throat pouch, but it’s certainly got some elasticity there to help it carry a big load.
Q. The informal verb “rook”–meaning to take money from someone by fooling or cheating them—and it’s also the name for a species of corvid. No coincidence, correct?
A. I think it’s definitely related, yes. [Laughter.]
Q. There’s a chapter in the book called “Delinquency.” [Laughter.] Let’s talk about that a little.
A. The rook is a rather large corvid, sort of halfway between a raven and a crow in size that lives in northern Europe. It’s closely tied to agricultural lands. It probes around for worms, for the most part. But they are very keen on getting food and hiding it, and keeping it hidden from others. They try to deceive others in terms of where they put food for later use. I would guess that they probably stole things that were laying around the farm—not just plants, but shiny things as well. That might have led to that saying.
Q. As I mentioned, there’s a chapter in the book called “Delinquency,” and a wonderful anecdote about windshield wipers, and delinquent crows.
A. It’s not an isolated incident. The interesting thing is that evidently corvids have a little bit of a penchant for windshield wipers all around the world. Out here in the Northern Cascades, I got a call from the National Park Service that was concerned with campers there. They were having their windshield wipers stolen while they were hiking or sleeping, and they were afraid that people would have an accident if they got in their car and didn’t realize their wipers were gone and hit a rainy day like today.
They figured out that it was a raven that was stealing these windshield wipers [laughter], and they had no ideas why, or how many birds were involved. My daughter and I went up there to start catching the ravens and tagging them and seeing who was participating, and maybe figuring out why they were doing this.
Long story short: It was a pair of ravens that lived right around this visitor center that was the culprit, and the folks at the park had already named it Hitchcock, and they were concerned again with the damage it was doing.
We tried to use its big brain to our advantage, and we captured the bird, Hitchcock and its mate. We captured them in a parking lot where cars are vulnerable to having their windshield wipers taken, and we banded the bird right on a windshield.
Q. Oh!
A. That’s an uncomfortable thing for a raven. They’re being held by us. Typically we try to be as calm and keep the birds in the dark as much as possible, but we didn’t this time. We let him look full-on at the windshield the whole time we were putting a band on his leg and measuring him, and tagging him for our scientific use later. And then we let him go. But we hoped that he would form a complex memory of that bad thing—that guy holding me, and looking at a windshield wiper and being in this area—and stop messing with windshield wipers from then on.
And indeed the behavior declined. It doesn’t occur now at all, and those birds are still around. We’ve been able to utilize the birds’ intellect to teach it what’s not acceptable in this setting, and allow the bird to live there and keep other ravens that might pick up the habit from coming in as well.
The other alternative was just to kill the bird and remove it.
Q. And people do that; they get infuriated with birds and destroy them.
A. There are other solutions, and this was an example.
Q. You said the birds are still there. How long do crows and ravens live?
A. The longest on record are somewhere in the 15- or 20-year range, because you have to have a bird banded to follow it, and really know its exact age. If you do the calculations based on their annual rate of mortality, which is very low—less than 5 percent—certainly there are some birds out there that are 20, 30 or maybe even 40 years old out there in the wild.
Q. Wow. With the windshield-wiper kleptomania, you said it’s not just that one incident?
A. It’s been reported in several national parks in the West. It’s been reported in Australia with a different species there. For some reason, these birds really like rubber. Maybe the pliable nature is kind of like an animal skin, and they tug at it—and that’s something that they find possibly leading to food, or that they find interesting or stimulating to touch. We’re not really sure why they do it.
Q. I am always wowed by stories about crows’ ability for facial recognition. Can we talk about Dick Cheney for a minute? [Laughter.]
A. This is funny. It was an experiment we devised, because whenever we study the birds around here, we climb to their nests to band their babies. Or we’d catch them to band or tag them. We always felt that the birds knew us after that; they acted differently. Some were more aggressive; some were more cautious around us after we had watched them awhile.
So we tested that idea directly. The idea we had was to catch a few birds—and the way we catch them is by shooting a net over them. So that’s a scary situation again. When we ran up to get the birds out of the net to band them and tag them, we wore a particular mask.
In our case, the dangerous guy wore a caveman’s face. So the birds as they were having this difficult experience with us, they were looking at a caveman the entire time.
Our idea was then anybody could wear this caveman’s mask later, and walk through where we caught birds. We could see if these birds really respond differently, and it wasn’t just us thinking that. Because anybody could do it.
We also wanted to compare the reaction to us wearing a different mask—and that’s where the Dick Cheney comes in. [Laughter.]
Dick Cheney was the vice president at the time, so his mask was on sale in the internet, and I got a couple. We now walk around campus as Dick Cheney or the caveman, and see if the birds can tell us apart.
Q. And they can, yes?
A. And they can, and they have been for nine years now. So this is an example not just of fine discrimination—to tell those two apart—but also social learning. Birds that are able to tell those masks apart now weren’t even born when the caveman did anything wrong.
They’ve learned from seeing others who were around demonstrate that this guy is bad.
Q. Besides being gifted in these ways we’ve been talking about, crows are inclined to give gifts—you mentioned shiny objects earlier. Have you ever received any yourself?
A. Personally I have never gotten a gift from a crow, probably because I do more scary things to them than pleasant things to them. But I’ve been gifted by learning about these treasures that many people get, and I have seen many of these treasures—and I’ve seen video of the birds holding these things now.
What it looks like are fairly young birds probably, or perhaps birds that don’t have a mate that are courting a human in this case really as a social partner. Maybe a mate, but at least as a social partner.
They give things like trinkets from lockets, or necklaces or keys, or pencil erasers, or shiny rocks and pieces of glass are very common that people get. It happens where either someone’s done a crow a really good deed like free it from a trap, or where they have been feeding them consistently.
Q. I love it. I’m so glad you could join me again to tell us about the gifts of the crow. (Black-and-white illustrations from “The Gifts of the Crow” are by co-author Tony Angell.)
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Researchers at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University discovered that hippocampal place cells in black-capped chickadees fire when the bird merely gazes at a distant location, revealing a unified spatial memory process driven by vision.
Many animals rely on vision to trigger recall for where food is hidden or to chart a course toward distant goals. Place cells in the hippocampus form the neural basis for such spatial memory, firing when an animal enters a specific location.
Earlier studies in primates found some hippocampal activity linked to where the eyes were directed, though recordings typically involved stationary animals.
Freely tracking eye movements during active behavior poses persistent technical obstacles as common laboratory models, such as rodents, lack precise gaze control. Researchers have not previously resolved how hippocampal place coding connects to the act of visually searching locations from afar.
In the study, “Remote activation of place codes by gaze in a highly visual animal,” published in Nature, researchers designed experiments to investigate whether hippocampal place cells in black-capped chickadees activate during visual fixation on distant spatial targets.
Eight black-capped chickadees participated in the experiments, which took place in a 61-centimeter arena containing five identical sites equipped with perches, light cues and motorized feeders.
Researchers adapted a multi-camera tracking system that triangulated infrared-reflective markers on each bird’s head to record head position during free movement.
A separate dual-camera video-oculography system estimated the pupillary axis by capturing corneal reflections, enabling calibration of eye-in-head orientation. Gaze direction was determined primarily by head orientation because chickadees exhibit minimal independent eye movement.
Birds performed a discrete visual search task in which a light cue signaled the rewarded site after a random delay, and a closed-loop version where the cue activated only when the bird gazed at the correct target. Silicon probes implanted in the anterior hippocampus recorded neural activity.
Recordings from 1,929 excitatory hippocampal neurons showed that 62% were tuned to the bird’s location during navigation and 57% responded to gaze direction during stationary visual search.
Among neurons classified as place-tuned, 75% also exhibited significant gaze tuning (changes in firing rate when the bird fixated on different target sites). Preferred locations for place and gaze responses overlapped in 95% of cells with strong selectivity. Contralateral (opposite-side) gaze accounted for most of the tuning, with neurons firing when the eye opposite the recording hemisphere fixated on a target.
Neural responses during fast head movements (called head saccades) displayed a biphasic pattern: an early component emerged before the bird’s gaze landed on the preferred target, and a later component corresponded to visual input.
Inhibitory interneurons clustered into two groups with firing phases roughly 180 degrees apart, creating a quasiperiodic oscillation linked to head saccades.
Results indicate that hippocampal activity encodes a combination of prediction and sensory response tied to where the bird directs visual attention. Findings suggest that saccadic head movements synchronize memory-related neural activity multiple times per second.
Researchers conclude that place coding and gaze coding form a unified process through which the hippocampus represents locations relevant to the animal at each moment. Such representations allow both the formation of spatial memories when a bird visits a site and the recall of those memories from afar upon return.
Exposing the Big Game 