[music] The raven, one of the m.. and one with a close connection to humans.

While native to the Mojave, its numbers have swelled so much that it's wreaking havoc on other desert animals, especially the endangered desert tortoise.

Now conservationists are grappling with how to address the problem, and solutions are being tested that question the usual conservation playbook.

"Can we reduce raven numbers without killing the birds?

Can we change how we've come to see the raven?

Can we adjust our own behavior before it's too late?"

[music] Earth Focus is made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, and the Orange County Community Foundation.

[music] Like humans, ravens play for fun, they plan for the future, they use tools to solve problems.

In short, there are a lot like us.

Like humans, they are one of nature's great generalists, able to survive almost anywhere and on anything.

Today, ravens in the Mojave aren't just surviving, they're thriving.

Since the 1980s, their numbers have exploded more than 15 fold.

While they're native species, they've come to be seen as an invasive one, partly for preying on the desert tortoise whose populations have collapsed by 90% To understand why ravens have increased so dramatically, we have to look at how we've altered the desert.

[music] Over the past 40 years, the desert southwest from Texas to California has been the most rapidly urbanizing area in the United States.

Our urban expansion has brought a lot to the desert that never existed here before.

Not only has this provided the raven with everything it needs, but our growth has pushed further and further into desert wildlands.

This has taken a devastating toll on animals that aren't quick to adapt like the raven.

In order to limit raven populations, several ideas have been put on the table.

The most extreme, lethal removal.

These solutions have been entertained because we have a collective, deeply ingrained view of the bird.

Ravens have long occupied the role of villain or trickster in folklore and mythology.

Throughout history, many cultures believe that ravens were bad omens, signaling disaster or death.

Their haunting image probably comes from their dark, mysterious appearance, and from observing them scavenging on animal and human remains.

Now as ravens threatened a beloved icon like the tortoise, the menacing image has only been reinforced.

How to deal with the raven isn't just about understanding the bird's behavior.

It's about looking at the landscape we've created in a new way.

With a sharp eye and the right guide, you'll start to see that ravens are all around us, and where you see them shows us exactly why they're thriving.

My name is Marcos Trinidad, and I'm a bird conservationist.

When I go out in urban spaces, there is so much to learn.

I just think it's so fascinating to come with experience and knowledge and continue to be able to learn through observation.

Ravens are doing exactly what they were built to do, making progress towards amplifying their role in ecosystems.

Whether or not we agree with that path or the pattern, maybe not, but they are amazing in the sense that they're here, they're making their presence known, and they've embraced the urban environment.

It's really cool to see Palm Springs are just this desert space that has its own ecosystem and a bird like the raven being one of the smartest birds out there expand its home range.

[music] We're right in between this urban and open interface, and there's this row of vegetation with these large Canary Island pine.

I'm standing on an abandoned tennis court right next to a Rouse Market and a hardware store, and you have dumpsters, which could be a potential food source, but also you have a source of protein that is in the vegetation.

I've been noticing these ravens are coming out to these palms and searching for little bugs, ripping out some of the plant material, finding those bugs, snacking, also grooming each other.

This is providing some crucial habitat for these ravens.

They also have a perfect view of both sides of the tree line, which I think is very favorable for a location if you're going to go and have your guard down and relax.

This is a prime location in the desert.

[music] We've created the perfect environment for ravens to thrive unintentionally.

If we want to control an environment, like be in the desert, we have to alter this natural space.

In doing that, it creates a network of things that other species are able to use in a very opportunistic way.

A bird as intelligent as a raven can see this.

What I stumbled on here is a raven nest that was located in a palm.

There are a lot of features to this park that you would normally not find in a desert, so it is not an ecosystem that would exist naturally.

The dependency on human interaction with this park is heavy.

There's a lot going on, there's a playground right under it.

They have adapted so much that they even have a comb as some of their material that they use to build this nest.

Observing where ravens are thriving means shifting how we see the bird and also how see ourselves.

For the indigenous peoples of the Mojave, raven provide insight into balance in the desert ecosystem and what role we humans play in it.

My name is Sienna Thomas, and I work for the Living Desert as a conservation social scientist where I work with indigenous youth trying to reconnect them to the land.

The hikes that we do are for Indigenous women because we feel that Indigenous women are teachers.

In life, your mother is your first teacher and so that's where we wanted to take this, is to bring indigenous women back to the land.

That way they can be those teachers to their children to introduce them to the land and let them know this is our way, this is our land, this is where you belong.

Birds are some relatives that we looked to for our lifeways.

We would monitor them closely.

[foreign language] [foreign language] Yes.

He says, "Nobody's called me that in 50 years."

It's been a bit.

We always knew where resources work because of them, and then even some other social behaviors, we kind of adopt that.

In our ways, in my culture in particular, we have bird songs and bird dancing.

It's a very beautiful thing to see and to know that a lot of our life ways came from watching our relatives, and the birds are a major relative.

Ravens are viewed as holding a lot of power, and they're very intelligent.

You could see how we came to that conclusion.

It's like they must be very powerful.

In our way, we feel like they're our ancestors because they've been here longer than us.

They were here before us in our creation story.

All these things were made before we even stepped into the picture.

It's like you're giving them respect because we always respect our elders.

They are also a symbol for a transition.

I think as we're seeing their growth in population, we are also seeing transitions, not only in the natural world, but also in the spiritual world as well.

Last year we had a pair of great horned owls and they had two owlets and we got to enjoy a few months of them.

Hawks, owls, they all share or they all take over each other's nests so it could be could be anybody.

On one of the areas that we managed, we had a pair of great horned owls that had made their nest or they occupied the nest and we had two babies, two owlets were making their way around all spring last year.

This year, not so much.

A couple of the site monitors that we have watching our parcel noted a lot of raven activity.

Whether or not they were making their own nest somewhere and using the great horned owls' nest, it remains a mystery but we know that the owls aren't there and that we have a pretty steady population of a family of ravens in the area.

I appreciate watching any bird and noting their behavior but I was heartbroken that the great horned owls moved out of the neighborhood.

They found another suitable location.

There's been this massive influx of ravens in the Mojave Desert.

It's indicative of a problem, a very real problem of people's behaviors affecting what this animal is depending on in the wild.

The animals are being animals and they're doing what they do.

I think for a lot of people, they need to understand that everything has its cycle and sometimes things get unbalanced but I'll always find its way back.

The onus is on people.

We're making all the food available for the ravens.

We're affecting their overabundant population right now.

Yes, that's just one of those things where we have to relearn how to balance everything because we're the ones not living in balance.

It's not the animals, it's us.

The indigenous peoples of the Mojave have always understood that humans are part of nature.

This perspective is beginning to inform conservation methods.

The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens is rethinking our relationship with ravens.

Instead of trying to alter the birds' behavior, they're taking a different path.

One that tackles the social origins of the problem.

Ravens are an essential part of our ecological community here.

They're native to our area.

They're beautiful birds.

They're really smart.

They're creative.

They're innovative.

In the past, they were migratory.

They weren't residents here year-round.

The population size was about a 20th of what it is now.

They lived in the area.

They got the food.

They ate the animals that they eat.

They got the water from natural sources, and then they left in the summer when it was too hot and there wasn't enough water.

Now, because we have all this water, and we have all this food and we have nesting surfaces and we have shade structures so that the heat's not so bad and the sun's not so bad, their populations have exploded, and they're not migratory anymore.

They're here year-round.

So it's 20 times.

Big deal.

They're cool birds.

They're smart.

They're interesting.

They do funny things.

What does that mean?

What's the impact implications for th.. Those implications are massive because those birds are not just eating trash, they're not just eating the food that we're providing, they're not just drinking the water that we're providing, they're also in the same urban areas.

They're eating the nesting birds that are in the trees above where those dumpsters are.

They're eating the lizards that are running across the sidewalk in front of you.

More importantly, or at least equally as importantly, out in the wild in nature, they're eating desert tortoises.

Ravens are the biggest predator of desert tortoises, so we want to try to address the problem at its root and the root is us.

It's not the ravens, it's us.

We have to reduce the subsidies.

We have to cover our trash.

We have to get restaurants to cover their trash.

We have to do a better job with our landfills.

We have to reduce the amount of extra water that we provide into the wild.

We have to be mindful of where ravens are at all times and their impacts on nature.

It's like all plastic at the top too.

My name is Katie.

I'm the lead conservation social scienti.. My name is Lou.

I'm the lead conservation biologist at the.. We are here to survey dumpsters, by which I mean check to see if the dumpsters of any restaurants or food-related businesses are opened or closed, and whether there's any debris or food subsidies on the ground around any of the dumpsters.

Obviously open.

There's a lot of debris.

There is food waste, fruit, eggshells, and a lot of flies.

Lots of food options.

[music] The work that we're doing to try to address this human caused disaster takes lots of forms.

We work with restaurants through what we call a Gold Star restaurant program, where we award restaurants that cover their dumpsters.

Those that don't, we go in and we talk to them, and we try to get them to cover the dumpsters.

If they cover their dumpsters after our interventions, we give them a Gold Star Restaurant Award, and that is a goal of trying to get their name out as desert protectors.

We're targeting restaurants and food businesses since those are kind of the low-hanging fruit, where they obviously have the most food waste that they're putting out in their dumpsters.

We have also worked with residents as well but these massive dumpstersare just where a ton of food subsidies accumulate and make it really easy for ravens to access those subsidies, they don't have to work too hard for it.

We survey each place five times and then we look at which places had their dumpsters closed at least 80% of the time.

For those that have theirs open frequently, we go in and ask to speak with the supervisor and we'll provide some pamphlets and bulletins with information and really just explain this whole connection between the dumpsters, the food subsidies, the ravens, and the desert tortoise.

It's not necessarily an obvious connection that people would make.

We also have a bunch of programs where we work with our partners to try to breed additional tortoises that we then work with them to release back out into the wild.

We're trying to restock native populations.

Most conservation problems are huge and they're complicated.

Conservation, they often call them wicked problems because there's so many things that go into them, so many parts that contribute, so many solutions possibly necessary.

Best way to get at it is multi-pronged, many directions.

One thing isn't going to do it.

Even working with changing people's behavior, if we change people's behavior, super successful and we take away all the food subsidies, all the water subsidies, there's still going to be a lot of ravens around for a w.. We have to do something to deal with the problem in the short term as well.

Even if you get at the root causes of why things are going on, there's still going to be a need for other activities.

As a consequence, we need to be able to have this tool kit.

Lots of tools in our tool kit that we can draw from and we can deal with different aspects of the problem in different ways.

The emerging toolkit of non-lethal solutions also includes innovative work by scientists at Hardshell Labs.

After tagging ravens with GPS trackers, they've created maps of their behavior, revealing the true scale of the problem, and it's led them to a hot spot, a place they call Ravenville.

[music] The ravens around the rest of the world, they're often known as harbingers of wilderness because they're just out in the middle of the forest as just an individual pair.

You might see two or three or four of them flying around, but here you just see hundreds of them and they particularly thrive in that human wildland interface, not in the desert wilderness.

We'll see individuals there sometimes, but not in large numbers.

We really had to focus on finding better ways of keeping them away from landfills, but also keeping them away from a lot of other sources of particularly food and to a certain extent water.

This map is showing a heat map of the locations where we have found one particular radiotransmitted raven.

The red color is where that raven has spent most of its time.

The yellow is where it's spent some time, but not as much, and the green is where it has spent less time.

This is the Victor Valley Wastewater Recovery Authority sewage ponds, and The American Organics Industrial Compost Center is right here.

You could see ponds and things below the green color.

We know that the red area is an area where it's eating because that's right at the-- [crosstalk] -That's right.

-That overlaps American Organics.

-Yes.

It could just be where it likes to hang out during the day.

-Right, if it is not nesting.

-Right.

Putting GPS transmitters on these birds has opened a window into their world.

The surprise was there weren't a lot of surprises.

They did pretty much exactly what I expected.

What I envisioned them to do, they did it.

They went to dairies.

Dairies are a major subsidy.

They went to the nearby dump.

They went into a waste transfer facility.

All of that was predictable, and it was reassuring that, "Okay, they have drawn us maps that essentially will be the basis of regional raven subsidy denial planning."

It's great.

It's just like you pop this solar-powered thing on the .. and they're telling you what to pay attention to.

[music] It's very fragrant.

So there it is.

-Oh, man.

-Fats, oils, and grease, my friend.

-Got it.

-That's some fog right there.

-That is just so lovely.

-Yes.

It's a cornucopia for ravens.

Our interest as human beings running a sewage treatment plant is to get the fats, oils, and grease out of the system so that the bacteria can work on everything else.

That's where the ravens come in and go, "Oh, it's floating calories."

Everything that gets flushed and washed down the drain comes through here.

I'll just let the visual metaphor speak for itself, but they have to get rid of solids before they can work on the liquids, and of course ravens had figured out, "Oh, okay, there's good food bits in here."

There we go.

What was it?

I don't even know what that is.

Yes, I do.

What cool this winter when we came in, ravens had stuffed old paper towels in that spiky Nixalite up to the point where they could comfortably sit on top of it, and pull the stuff out.

That guy we watched, he was over here and I also saw him up o..

They're smart, very adaptable, highly variable.

They're fascinating birds.

It's really been a joy studying them for 33 years.

It's too bad that the reason I'm studying them is so that we can reduce their numbers.

Part of my motivation for some of the work that we're doing now is because the work that we're doing is for non-lethal reduction.

That way, we're not going out and killing them.

We're basically using their behavior against them.

That makes it an interesting intellectual challenge.

One of the ways that we're using their behavior against them is by using lasers.

We've found that ravens are super sensitive to particularly green laser light.

We're using lasers to chase them out of agricultural fields like pistachio groves to chase them out of sewage ponds and compost centers.

Going out.

There it is on the far bank.

Lasers are not hurting the birds.

It's not like a heat laser that burns when it touches you, it's just light.

They're at a distance so it might flash by, but it's just a really quick flash and it works really well.

I'm going to sweep over and hit that set to the left a little bit.

There they go.

Right there he goes down in the bushes.

You're not going to get away from me.

Here's the basics of raven repulsion with lasers and it's non-lethal.

We're not hurting them, but we're getting rid of a problem without having to get rid of the birds.

The default setting a lot of times is, "Oh, let's just kill them."

If you kill them, then everybody's ignorant.

If you train them, some of the birds know what's up.

Another technology that we're using is, it's called the egg oiling.

It tricks the ravens into thinking that they're still incubating a viable egg.

They'll sit there and they'll sit there sometimes for several weeks thinking that the egg is eventually going to hatch.

What that does is it brings them so late into the breeding season that it's too late for them to lay a new clutch of eggs.

We've oiled well over 1,000 eggs.

There's evidence now that in the desert, the numbers of ravens are going down, probably as a result of the egg-oiling At this point, when there's an emergency going on, you don't want to be modest, you want to be bold.

Give it a shot.

Maybe it doesn't pan out.

If it doesn't pan out, it doesn't pan out.

I have learned to not underestimate the potential of cooperating human beings to solve problems.

We invented egg oiling and egg oiling is now proving out to be an effective way to reduce the pressure ravens are putting on tortoises and other desert wildlife.

Very few biologists ever get to say something like I just said, which is, "Dang, we made this up and it's working."

While conservationists are working on sustainable ways to live with ravens, the scale of the problem is so big that it requires a cultural shift in how we understand our own role in the desert.

Conservation in the past, not just at zoos, but conservation broadly has been almost exclusively focused on the biological problems.

We'll go out, we'll survey the animals, we'll understand what the plants are doing, we'll look at the water flows, and all the biological, ecological things, and then we'll try to address those things.

We'll breed more of whatever and release those animals back out there.

We'll replant plants.

It's good.

It's not enough, because when you're doing that, you're not addressing the problem.

You're dealing with the consequences.

You're dealing with the symptoms, really.

The problem in conservation is people.

It's us always.

Because it's us, we have to change our behavior.

We have to change the behavior of our communities.

We have to change the behavior of the people we're living in or visiting the natural areas.

There's this distinction that people make, bad species, good species, bad raven, good tortoise, but to most indigenous people, they're all good.

They're all meant to be here.

It's like that self-reflection doesn't take place.

They're not factoring themselves in as being important to the environment, but we are.

That's what needs to change, it's not the animals.

It's us.

I think we need to do a lot of reflection on how we want to exist in this world.

Every year, we get a list of things we will no longer have, but instead of us saying, "Hey, how do we change that?"

we say, "Hey, who do we need to blame for why this is happening," without really reflecting and changing our behavior?

It's about understanding how we live in this system, and how we choose to show up.

[music] Earth Focus is made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropy, and the Orange County Community Foundation.