Shade, the white-necked African raven, and her handler Emily Faun Cory will return to the Sedona Public Library on Saturday, June 1, at 3 p.m. for a free educational program on ravens and other corvids.

Cory, whose parents run Northern Light Balloon Expeditions, received her master’s degrees in applied bioscience and psychology and her doctorate in psychology with a minor in astrobiology from the University of Arizona. A 14-year volunteer at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and an animal behavior specialist, her interest in corvids started when she was volunteering for the museum’s Raptor Free Flight Program, which offers demonstrations of birds of prey for attendees. Cory eventually came up with an idea to use ravens to assist with search and rescue operations by training them to spot lost hikers as part of her master’s program.

“When I first moved to the University of Arizona from home, I was still part of the Sedona Police Explorers group here in Sedona,” Cory said. “And I couldn’t really be a member anymore, but I would help out when I’m back in town, and I really enjoyed law enforcement. So as I watch this raven at Raptor Free Flight and realize how smart they are, and how they naturally will work with humans, I thought that ravens could be trained to help out law enforcement.”

It’s been almost 18 years since Cory first met Shade, who was bred by an employee of the Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse, N.Y., who breeds raven as hobby

“We ended up having to buy a person from the zoo a round-trip ticket from New York,” Cory said. “And [she] carried Shade in a cat crate on her lap the whole way. We met her at Sky Harbor Airport and she took us to the women’s restroom and put down the baby changing table and showed us how to feed Shade … We got some really funny looks when people were coming into the Sky Harbor bathroom and saw what we had on the baby changing table.”

Shade, like all ravens, is mischievous, but Cory described her as a loving and gentle bird.

“I’m very good at repairing things,” Cory said. “Ravens are always on a search-and-destruct mission. So you get very handy with super glue and tape and cleaning supplies because she’s very messy as well … I would say she’s probably like a four-or-five-year-old. Except the problem is, she pretty much has a toolbox attached to her face with an icepick and a hammer and a wrench all there ready to go. And she can fly. So you can’t put anything up out of her way. She knows how to use a lot of the machines in the house.”

One of Shade’s pranks is turning off the lights in the laundry room while Cory has her hands full with clothes.

“Another time, I was trying to load statistical analysis software on my computer and I was having a terrible time, the computer just kept going into an endless reboot,” Cory said. “So I gave up and I called tech support. They put me on hold. While I was sitting there, Shade came along and hit the eject button, grabbed the program disc and flew off with it. That’s right when tech support came back on the phone with me. I did not know how to tell them that a raven just flew off of the program disc, and I wasn’t going to admit that. So instead, I told them all, ‘Oh, no, I figured it out. Thanks.’ And then I went into a tech support place on campus instead. So she really loves making mischief.”

Cory added that she is interested in doing additional research on ravens, spurred in part by Shade’s media consumption, in particular anything related to zombies, which Cory humorously suggested might arise from Shade’s instincts as a carrion eater.

“She seems to understand storyline, and which characters are good guys and which characters are bad guys,” Cory said. “She really liked vampire movies, for example. She’ll jump at the appropriate time, and then go back to watching the movie. And so that is also supposed to be a human-only characteristic. I really like to investigate that. But it’s tricky. Because I need some way to get actual measurements from what she’s doing, how she’s behaving, how she’s responding. We’re building a new house, which will have a nice study room in it so I can pursue that. But building a new house these days is very slow going.” 

While common ravens are protected by the Migratory Bird Act, “in most states … the government doesn’t care if you get a species native to other continents though. So I did not have to get any special licensing or permits for Shade,” Cory said.

Advanced registration is required for this free program, which may be done online at sedonalibrary. libcal.com. Questions may be directed to SPL at (928) 282-7714.