Image: Tom Fowlks
After more than three decades working as a desert tortoise biologist in the Mojave, Tim Shields began experiencing uncontrollable impulses to chase Common Ravens. While walking tortoise plots he’d surveyed for years, he’d see a black blur drop to the ground a half-mile away. His mind would flash on piles of palm-sized, picked-clean tortoise shells beneath electrical towers, and he’d tear off in a frenzied, and inevitably doomed, attempt to prevent the would-be killer from snatching one of his beloved subjects. “I’d run toward it like some crazy, possessed man,” he says. “I couldn’t stop myself.”
Shields had become morbidly convinced that ravens would finish off the ancient animals in whose company he’s now spent 38 of his 60 years. As a young field grunt decades earlier, he would see 80 or more tortoises a week. He documented males head-bobbing and ramming each other in testosterone-fueled frenzies, females munching on magenta beavertail cactus flowers, couples copulating in the morning sun. The creatures were already in decline at that point, largely due to habitat destruction and the pet trade. At the same time, raven populations were swelling.
If witnessing the torts’ slow decline was disquieting, what happened next was devastating. ...
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