At Washington, DC’s National Zoo, science fiction writer Ray Nayler and a companion watched a Kori bustard erupt into a brief, intense display—and later used the encounter, along with other bird sightings, to reflect on how communication, compassion, and socia
On a cool April morning in Washington, DC, the kind of spring that seems to arrive briefly and then slip away, Ray Nayler and I ended up in an unexpected kind of stillness: a staring contest with the world’s heaviest flying bird.
We were 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. it looked almost engineered for confrontation—an angular heronlike figure with what seemed like a parrying dagger for a beak. It approached, turned to the left, stopped, and held its pose for a moment.
Then it exploded. Thin salt-and-pepper feathers in its long neck puffed outward in one sudden motion. and a wave seemed to run through the plumage of the wings folded across its back. After that burst, the bird was still again. Without a sound, it turned once more to the left and strode back to its fellows.
We didn’t fully understand what we’d seen, but it carried a message anyway. Nayler suggested later that it was “engaging with us.” We took the hint 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 precisely, to discuss his fiction. His work often returns to a simple premise: humans can be better to one another by paying attention to what we might learn about ourselves through contact and communication with animals.
His first novel. “The Mountain in the Sea” (2022). imagines researchers in the near future struggling to parse the language of especially intelligent octopuses that communicate in part through messages effectively written on the water in their own ink. “The Tusks of Extinction” (2024). his follow-up. won a Hugo Award and features an elephant researcher’s mind uploaded into the brain of a genetically recreated wooly mammoth so she can help a herd of resurrected animals learn to live together in a transformed near future.
Now, in “Palaces of the Crow,” Nayler turns for the first time to historical fiction. The novel follows a group of resourceful teenagers trying to survive in the woods beyond Vilnius during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the early 1940s. Their assistance comes from a flock of special crows that protect and form relationships with the children—and 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.
As we moved through the zoo’s enclosures. the details of how Nayler writes about animals became harder to separate from what we were seeing. He draws extensively on research into crow behavior and cognition. and he captures how. among other things. crows raise their young and how they can grow almost completely still when thinking through a problem. He does it without making the birds chatty or enchanted in the way some entertainment does.
One scene in his work keeps its distance from anthropomorphism: a bird keeps a young woman on the right path not by delivering grammatical cawing. but by flying at her face and clawing at her skin when she goes astray. Even with their intelligence, the crows remain distinctly crow-like. They never turn into “little humans with wings. ” and even the book’s science-fiction edges don’t blur them into something indistinguishable from people.
That insistence on difference is crucial to Nayler’s view of empathy—built. he believes. on recognizing shared otherness rather than pretending there’s no gap at all. The point is sharpened in a moment he offered about the Kori bustard’s behavior: “That’s enough to build empathy. ” he said of how animals like the Kori bustard attempt to address us. “Mutual attempts at understanding are enough. It doesn’t have to be understanding. It just has to be the desire to understand.”.
Before the conversation could settle into theory, the zoo kept offering encounters that made the idea physical.
Near another outdoor enclosure, we watched a circular pen inhabited by two barred owls. One was active in the morning light, efficiently demolishing the small body of a mouse. As Nayler spoke. the owl craned back its head and swallowed the rest of the rodent’s body in a single go. leaving the tail hanging from its mouth for a moment before it. too. disappeared down its esophagus.
The feeding scene was vivid, but Nayler seemed more struck by something else he told me about birds. He pointed to behavioral ecologist Antone Martinho-Truswell’s book “The Parrot in the Mirror: How Evolving to be Like Birds Makes Us Human. ” and said that birds tend to be much more peaceful with other birds than nonhuman primates are with one another. In his telling. birds learned long before mammals did to live in big. peaceful groups—and that social steadiness resembles how humans live. in at least one essential way. Crows may gather in “murders. ” and they are not shy about eating other animals. but for the most part. Nayler said. they look after each other.
He also spoke as an admirer of Peter Kropotkin, the 19th- and 20th-century anarchist political philosopher and scientist. Kropotkin’s 1902 book “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution” comes up regularly in “Palaces of the Crow” and clearly informs Nayler’s thinking about interspecies collaboration. For Kropotkin. Nayler said. collaboration mattered most—treated as the real engine of evolution rather than viewing nature as only a brutal arena of individual competition. In Kropotkin’s phrase. “Life in societies is the most powerful weapon in the struggle for life.” Nayler’s fiction resonates with that idea without forcing it into a slogan.
In the owl enclosure, his own attention seemed to shift from predator to companion. The other owl kept an unflinching gaze on us as its companion ate. It was quieter than the bustard’s sudden display, but it carried the same unmistakable assurance. Earlier. Nayler had told me he hadn’t grown up with animals. yet he came to love them as a child when he got the impression they were watching him back.
That sentiment appears in his fiction: “Every time I watch [the crows], trying to understand what they are doing, I find them watching me, trying to understand what I am doing.”
For Nayler, it’s that shared struggle to understand others in their irreducible otherness that becomes the basis for empathy—and for the possibility of connection.
Communication isn’t always an invitation to cooperate, of course. Nayler offered an example from Jesper Hoffmeyer’s book “Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs.” When a brown hare notices it’s being stalked by a fox. he said. the hare turns. stands up erect. and makes eye contact. The foxes, knowing they will never catch the now-alert quarry, leave instead of chasing. Both animals save energy they might otherwise waste and avoid unnecessary injury.
As Nayler put it: “That’s a great example of cooperation in a competitive situation. It’s a little like a Christmas truce.”
He has seen that kind of adaptation in his own life too. Not long ago, Nayler told me, he and his 6-year-old daughter spotted a fox while walking in the woods.
“I’m probably smarter than a fox, right?” his daughter suggested.
“Let me ask you: Who is smarter in the forest?” he responded.
She thought about this for a moment. “Well, the fox is smarter in the forest, because I couldn’t live in a forest by myself for very long.”
“And who’s smarter in lots of different situations?” Nayler asked.
“That must be me,” she responded. “Because if the fox was out of the forest, it wouldn’t do very well.”
Nayler said the child had stumbled across one of the things that makes humans special: our capacity for abstraction. and therefore our ability to adapt to diverse circumstances. He connected that again to his research for “Palaces of the Crow. ” describing crows and their kin as defining themselves through adaptation to humans. “The edges of our societies are full of opportunities for them,” he told me.
Later, Nayler described a visit to tide pools in California, where a flock of elementary school students mobbed the beach. After the children left, crows descended on the pools and began hunting hungrily along their edges. Since crows normally keep their distance from beaches, Nayler asked a ranger what they were doing.
The ranger told him the birds understood that “children aren’t very careful with their feet, and they step on snails. And so after the children leave, there’ll be a feast of snails. So they wait.” Then they dine, the ranger said, fed by the chaos people make.
That tension between human destruction and the kinds of animal survival that can follow runs through “Palaces of the Crow.” Nayler’s especially clever crows engage in forms of sociality and tool use that outstrip what’s known about corvids today. but they are still descendants of carrion birds. In his framing. they make a “banquet” from the kind of damage humans unleash—damage that appears in literature and history as well as in a modern landscape.
He also linked the book’s fantasy hope to the reality that crows thrive on debris from war. The especially brutal Eastern Front battlefields of World War II become a setting where the birds survive and build. fortify their own homes on the outer edges of conflict. and adapt to the aftermath. “So much of what crows associate themselves with is damage that humans do to the animal environment,” Nayler told me.
Even with wartime brutality. antisemitism. and the arbitrariness of violence on the page. he said the novel imagines something more like an economy of care between humans and nonhuman animals. He describes the possibility of extending human capacities through encounters with beings who see the world differently.
As the discussion at the Bird House was ending. Nayler brought up philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” He said it is often misread as an argument that people cannot know anything about how the world is perceived by someone with a different sensory apparatus. Instead. Nayler said Nagel concludes it is possible to approach that problem and not reach it all the way—but to get part of the way there.
In Nayler’s own approach. telling stories about animals seems to be a way to imagine a fragile path toward that understanding: approaching the biologically bound lifeworlds of other creatures. asymptotically. If his latest novel has a thesis. Nayler told me. caring for others—humans and nonhuman animals alike—in their specificity and peculiarities is the purest source of strength.
Near the end of the story. a few characters—now adults—reflect on why the crows watched them so closely and helped them survive. One of them posits: “There has never been a deeper reason necessary for cruelty.” Then the character answers with an equal question: “Why would a deeper reason be necessary for kindness?”.
Zoos, of course, complicate the mood. They are strange places to think about kindness. At their most valuable. Nayler said. zoos can be refuges for species that can no longer thrive in the world people have remade for comfort. But the reality of confinement is unavoidable: the Kori bustard’s range is vastly smaller than the one it should call home. while the owl looks down from a single tree when it should be free to hunt through an entire forest.
Yet Nayler said there’s another kind of value in captivity and attention. Standing in a room resounding with the calls of tropical birds. he described zoos as spaces that give visitors a chance to watch animals for longer than they otherwise might—and often at animals they would never see. In the act of observation. he said. people should become still and slow as crows trying to solve a puzzle. considering what might be in common while recognizing that these strangers are “worthy of our care and of our attention.”.
Days after our visit, Nayler sent an email that circled back to the smallest moments—the ones that stuck. “One thing I keep remembering from our morning at the zoo is the little spoonbill watching us with its wise. gray. old-man face. ” he wrote. In that quiet dignity. he explained. he saw “an acknowledgement that animals were our first teachers. helping us learn how to be in the world.”.
It sounds like the simplest claim—animals teach, if you let them—but in Nayler’s novels, it becomes something larger. There’s a recognition, perhaps, that nature still offers instruction: not only morality, but generosity. A generosity people have to be willing to offer in kind.
Ray Nayler National Zoo Washington DC Kori bustard Bird House empathy crows Thomas Nagel Peter Kropotkin Mutual Aid Palaces of the Crow zoos