I used to think play was something animals outgrew, like losing baby teeth or that weird phase where you’re scared of vacuum cleaners.
But ravens—these glossy, croaking tricksters—they never really stop. I’ve watched them in parking lots, on hiking trails, even perched on dumpsters behind grocery stores, and here’s the thing: they’re almost always doing something that looks suspiciously like fun. Young ravens will grab sticks and play tug-of-war, sure, but so will adults. A researcher in Austria, I think it was Bernd Heinrich or maybe someone citing his work, documented ravens repeatedly sliding down snowy slopes on their backs, climbing up, and doing it again. No food involved. No mates to impress. Just… sliding. It’s the kind of behavior that makes you wonder if we’ve been underestimating what goes on inside a bird brain, which—spoiler—we definately have.
The juvenile phase is when things get really chaotic. Fledglings chase each other through tree branches, drop objects mid-flight just to dive after them, and engage in what ornithologists call “object play”—basically messing around with random stuff. A bottle cap. A twig. A shiny wrapper.
Anyway, this isn’t just kids being kids.
Adult ravens continue these behaviors well into maturity, sometimes for years, maybe their whole lives if conditions allow. In captivity, ravens have been observed playing with toys designed for parrots—bells, ropes, puzzle feeders—and they’ll invent games with them. One raven at a research facility in Germany learned to dunk a rubber ball into a water dish, then fish it out and repeat the process maybe thirty times in a row. No reward. No social audience most of the time. The bird just… liked it, I guess. Wild ravens do similar things: they’ll antagonize wolves and dogs by pulling their tails, not to steal food (though sometimes that’s a bonus), but seemingly because it’s entertaining. Wait—maybe that’s not pure play, maybe there’s some tactical benefit I’m missing, but researchers who’ve spent thousands of hours watching them say the tail-pulling often happens when there’s no carcass nearby, no clear payoff except the thrill of annoying a large predator.
Honestly, it’s hard to seperate play from other behaviors sometimes.
Why Smart Birds Keep Playing When Most Species Stop
Most animals abandon play after adolescence—it’s metabolically expensive, and adulthood brings responsibilities like not starving or getting eaten. But corvids, especially ravens, have these enormous brains relative to body size, roughly comparable to great apes when you adjust for scale (give or take, depending on how you measure). That brain power needs exercise. Play might be how they keep neural pathways flexible, test new problem-solving strategies, or just cope with boredom. Captive ravens get neurotic without enrichment; wild ones seem to seek it out actively. I’ve seen footage of a raven in Yellowstone repeatedly dropping a pinecone onto a frozen lake, watching it skitter across the ice, then retrieving it and doing it again. The bird looked… I don’t know, absorbed? Focused in a way that didn’t seem survival-oriented.
Turn out, social play persists too. Mated pairs engage in mutual preening that slides into playful wrestling. Groups of non-breeding adults—sometimes called “raven gangs” by researchers, which is maybe too anthropomorphic but also kind of accurate—will chase each other in aerial acrobatics that serve no obvious territorial or mating function. They’re just flying together, looping and diving, and it looks joyful. I’m aware that’s projection, but the behavior recurs across populations in Alaska, Scandinavia, the Mojave Desert, so it’s not just one weird population.
The Messy Reality of Studying Play in Wild Ravens
Defining play scientifically is a nightmare. It’s voluntary, non-functional in the immediate sense, and often involves exaggerated or repeated movements. But proving a behavior has “no function” is nearly impossible—maybe we just don’t understand the function yet. Some researchers argue that adult raven play strengthens social bonds, which could improve cooperative hunting or mobbing success later. Others think it’s cognitive maintenance, like how humans do crossword puzzles. A few suggest it’s just a byproduct of having extra energy and a brain that craves stimulation.
The data is messy because wild ravens don’t perform on cue. You might watch a group for eight hours and see one ambiguous interaction that could be play or could be low-level aggression or could be practicing a foraging technique. Captive studies help, but captivity changes behavior—maybe those ravens play more because they’re bored, or less because they’re stressed. It’s hard to say. What’s consistent, though, is that across contexts, across ages, ravens keep doing things that look an awful lot like play. Not always. Not every individual. But enough that it seems wired into who they are as a species, this tendency to mess around with the world even when nobody’s making them.
