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What we see when we look into the eyes of a bird

A sci-fi novelist ponders the mysteries of the animal mind.

On a cool April morning at the height of Washington, DC’s always brief spring, the science fiction novelist Ray Nayler and I found ourselves in a staring contest with the world’s heaviest flying bird. We were standing at the fenceline of the Kori bustard exhibit at Washington’s National Zoo when the largest of the already enormous omnivores broke away from its flock at the rear of the enclosure and began stalking toward us.

Gray and black and white with a parrying dagger for a beak, the Kori bustard resembled a heron that had taken up powerlifting. Approaching us and turning to the left, it stopped and grew still for a moment. Abruptly, it exploded. The thin salt-and-pepper feathers in its long neck puffed outward all at once, even as a wave seemed to run through the plumage of the wings folded across its back. Then it was still again. Without a sound it turned once more to the left and strode back to its fellows.

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Though we didn’t fully understand what we had seen, we still got the message, which was, at minimum, that the bird had a message for us. “It was engaging with us,” Nayler suggested later. We took the hint that it was probably telling us to go away and walked on. There were other birds to see.

Nayler and I had come to the National Zoo’s recently remodeled Bird House to talk about talking to animals. Or, more accurately, we had come to discuss his fiction, which often explores how humans can be good to one another by meditating on what we might learn about ourselves from our contact and communication with animals.

In Nayler’s first novel, The Mountain in the Sea (2022), researchers in the near future struggle to parse the language of a species of especially intelligent octopuses that communicate in part through messages effectively written on the water in their own ink. He won a Hugo Award for his follow-up, The Tusks of Extinction (2024), in which an elephant researcher’s mind is uploaded into the brain of a genetically recreated wooly mammoth, so that she can help a herd of these resurrected animals learn to live together in an utterly transformed near future.

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Both books are characteristic of one of Nayler’s central preoccupations: the way that an organism’s biology shapes its approach to communication and social life. Now in his new novel Palaces of the Crow, Nayler has turned for the first time to historical fiction. In it, he tells the story of a group of resourceful teenagers attempting to survive in the woods beyond Vilnius during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the early 1940s. They are assisted by a flock of very special crows who protect and form relationships with the children, and who are, in turn, protected by them in a second narrative thread that takes place decades later. The crows guide the children through the woods, warning them of danger and helping them find shelter and food.

Nayler draws extensively on research into crow behavior and cognition, ably capturing how, among other things, they raise their young and the way they grow almost completely still when thinking through a problem. Notably he does so without anthropomorphizing the birds; this is not the chatty, enchanted flock of some Disney film. In one scene, a bird keeps a young woman on the right path not through grammatical cawing but by flying at her face and clawing at her skin when she goes astray. Despite their pronounced intelligence, they remain defiantly crow-like, never turning into little humans with wings in the way that science fiction aliens are sometimes indistinguishable from earthlings, except for their pastel skin.

This insistence that what makes animals fascinating is their distinctness is crucial to Nayler, whose books reflect a........

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