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.

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 consistent belief that any true rapport begins in the recognition of shared difference, whether we are divided by language and culture or by the more intractable facts of biology. It’s a perspective that is all the more important at a time when the very technologies he writes about in his novels threaten to cut us off from the natural world. “That’s enough to build empathy,” he told me of the way that 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.”

That belief in the value of merely trying to understand runs deep for Nayler. When he was in his early teens, his mother insisted that he volunteer at a Californian animal shelter, hoping it would help him cultivate compassion. This was, he said, “a terrible idea, because the animal shelters back then were all kill shelters” He was confronted every day, as many shelter workers still are, by the cruelty of humans who would abandon companions they no longer wanted to care for, leaving them to be euthanized by others. “But maybe that also made me interested in animals as beings, because you could really see them and their personalities in those cages,” he told me.

As he was describing his experiences at the shelter, we came to another outdoor enclosure, a circular pen inhabited by two barred owls, still active in the morning light. One was efficiently demolishing the small body of a mouse — dinner, I suppose, on its night-shift schedule. As Nayler spoke, the owl craned back its head and swallowed the rest of the rodent’s body in a single go, letting the creature’s tail hang from its mouth for a moment before that, too, disappeared down its esophagus.

I was transfixed, but Nayler seemed less captivated by the feasting raptor than he was by many of the other birds we encountered over the course of the morning. Birds, he told me, citing the behavioral ecologist Antone Martinho-Truswell’s book The Parrot in the Mirror: How Evolving to be Like Birds Makes Us Human, tend to be much more peaceful with other birds than nonhuman primates are with one another. “They learned a long time before mammals did to live in these big, very peaceful groups and, and that’s that’s one of the things that they do that is a lot like us,” Nayler said. Crows may gather in murders, and they are not shy about eating other animals, but for the most part they look after each other.

Nayler is an admirer of the 19th- and 20th-century anarchist political philosopher and scientist Peter Kropotkin, whose 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which comes up regularly in Palaces of the Crow, clearly informs Nayler’s thinking about interspecies collaboration. For Kropotkin — a committed opponent of the view of nature as a brutal arena of individual competition — what mattered most was collaboration, which he took to be the real engine of evolution. The early chapters of Mutual Aid are populated with examples of animals helping one another, even in Siberia where Kropotkin conducted scientific surveys in his youth. In Kropotkin’s axiomatic phrase: “Life in societies is the most powerful weapon in the struggle for life.” It is a formulation that resonates implicitly through all of Nayler’s fiction.

Thinking of Kropotkin, I found my attention shifting to the other owl in the cage, which kept its unflinching gaze on us as its companion ate, more placid than the Kori bustard had been but no less assured. I recalled something Nayler had said earlier about how, despite not growing up with any animals, he came to love them as a child when he began to get the impression that they were observing him. It’s a sentiment he lends to one character in Palaces of the Crow: “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 is the shared struggle to understand others in their irreducible otherness that forms the basis of empathy — and the possibility of connection.

Life in societies is the most powerful weapon in the struggle for life.

As the owl demonstrated to that mouse, interspecies communication isn’t always about mutual aid, of course, though even when relations are tenser, it can still benefit both parties. Nayler cited an example drawn from Jesper Hoffmeyer’s book Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs of what happens when a brown hare notices that it’s being stalked by a fox. Under ordinary circumstances, foxes are not fast enough to catch an alert hare, so when the latter notices that the former is approaching, it “will turn, stand up erect, and look at the fox and make eye contact with it,” Nayler said. Knowing that they will never catch their now-alert quarry, the foxes simply depart instead of attempting to give chase. Both animals save the energy they would have otherwise expended, while also avoiding the risk of 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.”

Nayler has had his own encounters with foxes. Not long ago, he told me, he and his 6-year-old daughter spotted one of them while they were 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.”

She had, as Nayler put it to me, stumbled across one of the things that makes humans special, our capacity for abstraction and hence for adaptation to diverse circumstances. That is also, as he discovered in his research for Palaces of the Crow, a defining characteristic of crows and their kin, who have proven able at adapting to us. “The edges of our societies are full of opportunities for them,” he told me.

Not long ago, Nayler was exploring tide pools in California when a class of elementary school students mobbed the beach. After the children left, a flock of crows descended on the pools and began hungrily hunting along their edges. Knowing that crows normally keep their distance from the beaches, Nayler asked a ranger what the birds were up to. The crows, she said, know 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.” And then they dine, fed by the chaos we make.

This tension between human destruction and certain kinds of animal thriving resonates throughout Palaces of the Crow. Nayler’s curious and inventive crows engage in forms of sociality and even tool use that outstrip the already impressive capabilities of corvids as we know them today, but they are still the descendants of the carrion birds who make a “banquet” from Achilles’s fury in the Iliad’s opening lines. Palaces’ especially clever birds similarly thrive on the human debris of WWII’s especially brutal Eastern Front battlefields, even as they build and fortify their own homes on the outer edges of the conflict. “So much of what crows associate themselves with is damage that humans do to the animal environment,” Nayler told me.

The edges of our societies are full of opportunities for [crows].

And yet where much of Palaces unfolds against a background of conflict and desperation, it is at its most fantastical and most hopeful when it strives to imagine something more like an economy of care that might arise between human and nonhuman animals. Nayler makes explicit the lessons that we can take from such engagements, lovingly imagining how humans might extend our capacities through the encounter with beings who see the world differently. As we were leaving the Bird House, he brought up the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” observing that it is too often misread as an argument that “we cannot know anything about how the world is perceived by someone with a different sensory apparatus.” On the contrary, he noted, Nagel concludes “that it is possible to approach this problem and not get there all the way, but to get part of the way with it.”

Likewise, in Nayler’s books as surely as in our conversation, telling stories about animals also seems to be a way to imagine a fragile path toward the thing we can approach but only asymptotically — their biologically bound lifeworlds. If his latest novel has a thesis, it can only be that caring for others — humans and nonhuman animals alike — in their specificity and their peculiarity is the purest font of strength.

Palaces of the Crow is unflinching in its depiction of wartime brutality, antisemitism, and the arbitrariness of violence, but so, too, does it celebrate everything that is possible in spite of our own monstrosity. Late in the story, a few of the characters, now adults, reflect on why the crows who watched them so attentively also helped them survive. “There has never been a deeper reason necessary for cruelty,” one of them posits. “Why would a deeper reason be necessary for kindness?”

Zoos are strange places to contemplate kindness, of course. At their most valuable, they can be refuges for species that — unlike crows — can no longer thrive in the world that we’ve remade for our own comfort. But the reality of confinement is unavoidable; the Kori bustard we meet commands a vastly smaller range than the one it should call home, while the owl gazes down at us from a single tree when it should be free to hunt through an entire forest.

But as Nayler put it to me while we stood in a room that resounded with the calls of tropical birds, zoos are also spaces that give us the opportunity to spend time looking at animals for longer than we otherwise might — and often at animals we would never otherwise see. In the act of observing them, we should all become still and slow as crows trying to solve a puzzle, considering what we might have in common with them and recognizing that these strangers here are “worthy of our care and of our attention.”

Days after our visit to the Bird House, Nayler sent me an email. “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 of one of the first birds that had caught our attention. In its quiet dignity, he explained, he saw “an acknowledgement that animals were our first teachers, helping us learn how to be in the world.”

Nayler’s novels, too, aspire to convey something similar. A recognition, perhaps, that nature still has something to teach us, a lesson not just in morality, but also in generosity, a generosity that we must always be prepared to offer in kind.

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