Stranger than fiction is truth

As mentioned in my last post, we have one pair of ravens who live close by to us, nesting high in a very old oak tree. There are two more pairs of ravens who also live relatively close by and come to visit us every day, for we are faithful friends to our non-human neighbors. One of the most favored items we supply our non-human neighbors is bread and doughnuts. We did this at our former residence before we moved to our present one, and it appears that our raven friends followed us to our current residence where we've been for nearly nine years, now.
So, along with making sure we have adequate supplies for the ferrets, cats, dog, hamsters and doves within our home, we also see to it that there is seed, old catfood-kibble for the smaller birds (flycatchers, thrushes, woodpeckers and other protien-eating small birds go for the old cat food kibble in a big way! Every year we seem to be graced by more pairs of woodpeckers than the last, and this is good news for the elderly trees) and, of course, the ravens' so-much-favored doughnuts.
Donuts for the ravens!
Donuts for the birds!
They eat 'em, fly to heaven,
and drop 'em back as turds.
They fer-ti-lize the green-ery
and make the place a scene-ery
fit for a king and queen-ery
Donuts are for the Birds!

Yet here is the portion of our observation that is "stranger than fiction", for it is true. One day, a very grumpy person went stomping down our street, apparently mad at the world and without a vehicle to aim at it. As this person passed by our home, three ravens dive-bombed towards the fellow and let loose their donut-poops all over him. Not being able to return the favor and shaken from his angry reverie, the fellow turned and ran back up the street to his own house. This was only a first incident, however; over a year later, we put this puzzle-ing behavior together after the second incident...a person going door-to-door who was, apparently, already filled with an inner seething anger, was raven-poop-bombed just as she approached our house from our own next-door neighbor's and came to our door "anyway", begging a towel to help clean herself off with, which, of course, we supplied.
So the ravens have shown themselves our allies and/or friends, "marking" those who harbor hostilities if they appoach our home. We have shown ourselves to have been faithful friends to the ravens and all the other birds, and the ravens have found their own way to demonstrate a kind of reciprocation of demonstrated friendship.
Stranger, indeed, than any fiction is truth.

To see ourselves as others....

Here we are in our second technically inundated century, some of us scanning the skies for sounds or indications of non-human intelligent life.
How droll!, when, for many millennia, non-human intelligent life has been rife all around us. Some of these showing they have and employ complex languages which we still can not understand even a little of, whereas those who employ those languages display a ready comprehension of those of the humans.
Consider one of the species older than our own by many millions of years, the ravens and their near-kin, the crows. Every spring for the past nine years, a pair of nesting ravens who live in a nearby several-hundred-year-old oak near my husband and I sound as though they are teaching their newest fledgelings...something. Many and varied kinds of sounds do they use, occasionally mimicing other calls such as a dog's barking or a human calling-out. Are they teaching their language over three weeks' time? or are they telling teaching stories? outlining their philosophy, explaining what to look out for and when? How can we know?
Scientists have gone through the troubles of recording these "teaching" sessions of wild ravens in an attempt to decipher their language, the second most complex among non-humans which is vocalized (the dolphins' and whales being far more complex, utilizing sounds out of human hearing range...yet, can the ravens be employing some of those kinds of sounds as well? above and below humans' ranges?) . To date, no one has been able to decipher the least part of these non-human languages. The ravens' the dolphins' the whales' languages are all far beyond any translations of humans.
And what might they be saying about us to their youngsters? 'don't get to close to the mad almost furless apes, over there, they can be nice one day and try to kill you the next' ? How can we know? What unmitigated arrogance some of us have, to imagine we are somehow "superior" to non-humans when we can not even comprehend their languages, and they show they understand ours!
To see our selves as others see us.
And those others have been sharing livingspace with us for all the millions of years we have been here, and many more, before that we concocted relatively simple languages of our own...from listening to them?, such as the ravens in their trees, teaching their chicks, and we, still dragging all our knuckles, figuratively, (as naked apes who kill indiscriminately) still wonder what are they saying...