too many Daves

Professor John Marzluff’s recent words about his Pentagon-funded research have yielded multilingual tweets and gobsmacking headlines like NBC’s “US planned crow ‘spy network’ to find bin Laden.”

Crow spies struck me as either too good to be true or too bad to be true. So I emailed Marzluff. He’s been doing research out in Texas this week, but he wrote me back from the field:

If I did say (I don’t think I did) that the army asked me to train crows to find bin laden I should not have said that. What I hope I said was that I was asked to increase my research into the face recognition abilities of crows by the army for a variety of reasons, including searching for people of interest (and yes that might include bin laden and many others), but especially missing soldiers …

Marzluff’s clarification will have to compete with some irresistibly Hitchcockian notions of his research that have been loose in the wild for days. Spanish-speaking Twitter users are mentioning Marzluff by name and linking to a story headlined “El Ejército de EEUU utilizó cuervos entrenados para encontrar a Bin Laden en Afganistán (The U.S. Army used trained crows to find Bin Laden in Afghanistan).” The alumni association at Marzluff’s own University of Washington tweeted: “Based on UW Biologist John Marzluff’s research, the U.S. was planning on using crows as spies to find bin Laden.” The Seattle Weekly’s blog invoked “the image of America’s greatest enemy being pecked to death by highly-trained birds.”

The hype has its roots in an exchange between Marzluff and radio host Steve Scher at the very beginning of a May 4 broadcast on Seattle’s KUOW:

SCHER: John, you told me this, so I have to bring this story up. Because everything has to do with bin Laden.

MARZLUFF: Obviously.

SCHER: What’s the connection between ravens, crows, and Osama bin Laden?

MARZLUFF: Well, there was interest in trying to hunt him down, obviously, over the last decade. … And one of the experimental branches of research that was used to try to find him was to have crows or ravens of the local area trained to identify his face based upon some of the work we had done here to identify individual people. The crows are able to do that. The military thought, well, maybe ravens or crows in Afghanistan could do the same and find bin Laden.

When Scher asked “Did the ravens or crows help track down bin Laden in Pakistan?” Marzluff answered with “We don’t know. They might have played a role.”

But when he answered my email Thursday, Marzluff wrote that he doubts crows were part of the manhunt:

You would have to catch local crows while wearing a likeness of the person of interest and then monitor the crows to see when they reacted to seeing that person in the future.  I am sure the crows could do it, but if you have to monitor crows, why not just (monitor) the person of interest, the area, etc.(?)

I decided to phone the Pentagon. If you crave the experience of hearing the suppressed chuckles of a polite person who suspects you might be insane, I wholeheartedly recommend cold-calling the public affairs office at the United States Department of Defense and explaining that you’d like to get an official comment on whether the military deployed crows to search for bin Laden. The guy who fielded my call put me on hold for several minutes, picked back up, said nothing, and transferred me to what turned out to be the voicemail of Lt. Col. Elizabeth Robbins.

Robbins called back. She wanted to confirm that I really meant crows, like the birds. I asked her to Google “spy crows.” She did.

After digesting the Google results, Robbins said she couldn’t confirm the existence of spy crows or deny the existence of spy crows because the Pentagon isn’t commenting on any “operational details” surrounding the bin Laden raid.

“It’s a classified op, and we’re not going to share how we did stuff,” Robbins said.

University of Washington records show that Marzluff got $184,000 in 2007 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to investigate “individual recognition of people by American crows.”

One of the charms of this strand of Marzluff’s research is how accessible and concrete it seems. It’s not $1 billion to devise an airborne, solar-powered, crow-sized functional MRI machine. It’s $184,000, and it involves people catching crows while wearing rubber masks.

You get the exuberant feeling that ambitious, curious teenagers might be able to pull it off for a science fair. You get the deluded feeling that even we might be able to do it: Here, put on this caveman mask and go hassle those crows. Now go walk past the crows without the mask and see if they freak out. Now put the mask back on. Whoa! Now I’ll wear the mask. Whoa!!! OK, now put on this Dick Cheney mask.

Marzluff’s team really did use a Dick Cheney mask. It was one of their so-called “neutral” masks — a mask that nobody ever wore for catching crows.

I don’t know what Marzluff’s radio appearance and the headlines and the tweets will add up to. Marzluff himself worries there could be repercussions for the birds he studies. When I suggested that Taliban or al Qaeda fugitives might hear about his research and start exterminating every crow in sight, Marzluff wrote back “I am indeed worried about crows elsewhere.”

But if Ayman al-Zawahiri studies Marzluff’s published work, he will see that there’s probably a much less destructive way to evade detection by hypothetical spy crows: Wear a Dick Cheney mask any time he steps outside.