Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drummed his fingers impatiently on his lawn chair as a reporter and cameraman crouched expectantly in the bushes behind his Los Angeles home, where two wild ravens were not cooperating with the photo op.
“I’m not going to reward their bad behavior,” he said at last, closing the bag of greasy meat scraps he had brought for the birds. He strode into the house, dog in tow.
Kennedy, 70, an independent presidential candidate, has touted his distinguished political record, his background as an environmental lawyer and his sharp anti-establishment beliefs that sometimes lean toward conspiracy theories. But what is often overlooked in his appeal to voters is his long-held, and no-nonsense, image as a rugged outdoorsman with an unconventional passion for wildlife and nature.
But I was surprised recently when a routine call to Mr. Kennedy to ask for comment on another article was interrupted by a loud “clack-clack” from the other end of the line.
When asked what the noise was, Kennedy paused for a moment before replying, “I have some pet crows.”
I had so many questions, but the most burning one was, “Will I see the crows?” In any case, I was planning to go to Los Angeles the following weekend.
“Of course,” he said.
Kennedy has long had a special fascination with birds. From a young age he has kept ravens, peacocks, crows, owls, homing pigeons and guinea fowl as pets. He trains and hunts with hawks. In New York, he was a certified bird rehabilitator, caring for injured and orphaned birds. In 2005, he published a children’s book about St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals, birds and the environment. Campaign donors are invited to go falconry with him.
Ravens are beautiful, intelligent, cooperative, adaptable, fiercely protective, and ubiquitous, but they’re not creatures of high society. Their dark feathers, beady eyes, haunting cries, and voracious scavengers give them a prominent and eerie place in myth and folklore. Although opportunistic eaters of anything, ravens’ feeding on carrion — and thus comforting the dead — made them bad omens long before Edgar Allan Poe made the raven a cliché.
Their collective name is “The Unkind,” or, wait for it, “The Conspiracy of Crows.”
Mr. Kennedy and the personal and political curiosities surrounding him have emerged as an unpredictable factor in this presidential election, with some polls showing him with double-digit approval ratings and votes from both President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.
Even if he doesn’t get on the ballot in enough states, he could still swing the election: He’s already on the ballot in the battleground state of Michigan, and is on the ballot in five other states, and his campaign has submitted ballot applications in more than a dozen states. Other states voted similarly. This week Kennedy was disqualified from competing in CNN’s June 27 presidential debate.
Still, he had time to show me the ravens last week, so I drove with veteran New York Times photographer Ruth Flemson to the hills northwest of Los Angeles to meet them.
Out hiking with her three dogs, Kennedy recounted her first encounter with a crow when she was about 10 years old. Ravens are bigger and smarter than crows and are “more social,” Kennedy said.
About four years after he and his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, moved into their current home, he noticed a pair of crows nesting in a large palm tree. A few months ago, he decided to try to tame the birds, his main strategy being food.
“They’re getting closer and closer,” he said. “By the end of the summer, they’ll be eating out of my hand.”
I asked Hines how he felt about it, and he replied, “She’s good with crows,” but added, “She got into a big fight with my emu.”
Once back at the house, Hines admitted, “the emu was very aggressive.”
The emu, named Toby, moved with Kennedy to Malibu in 2014 and took up residence in the backyard. However, Toby became jealous of Hines and began to attack her violently. Hines began to carry a shovel whenever she went outside to protect herself. Every morning, Hines wondered, “Will today be the day I wake up and kill the emu in my backyard?”
One day, she was home alone and got a call from a producer and went outside to get a better signal. “As soon as I started telling him about the script, an emu started chasing me at full speed,” she recalled.
Here, Hines dressed up for a pickleball game and pretended to pitch to producers while swatting at a large, flightless bird.
A few years later, Toby was killed by a mountain lion.
Hines calls the crow relatively fussy and even “cute,” but it wants a bit of attention when Kennedy is away campaigning. Recently, Hines looked up to see the crow peering down impatiently through the skylight above her bathroom. “It’s like, ‘When are you coming back?'”
When the crow gently knocked on the door, there was no response: “Nevermore,” Hines said.
Instead she told them: “Guys, I’m not interested.”
As she told the story, Mr. Kennedy grabbed a bag of meat scraps from the refrigerator — “cheap steaks,” he called them — and walked out into the backyard. He lifted his head and yelled, “Caaaaah! Caaaaah!”
After a moment, two black arrows appeared in the sky, circling and drifting, their spade-like tails and feathers shining as they approached. The arrows called.
Mr. Kennedy tossed the meat on the deck and sat down in a lawn chair while Ruth trained a large lens on the scene from about 20 feet away.
The ravens flew around nearby several times, one by one. Finally, one landed in a nearby tree and the other landed on the deck. They grabbed the meat and then flew away.
“This is unusual,” Kennedy said, noting that the birds were particularly cautious, with one acting as lookout while the other held the food. “Usually they both land at the same time and come toward me.”
This continued for over an hour and they seemed to be getting more and more alarmed.
“I think they don’t like the cameras,” Kennedy said.
We decided to meet again later in the afternoon, when the crows were less frightened, while we toured his office and saw his stuffed former pet turtles and a Sumatran tiger that had been a gift from Indonesian President Sukarno. To Mr. Kennedy’s father, Robert F. Kennedy.
When we returned a few hours later, the ravens still seemed deeply suspicious, and Ruth and I darted up and down the deck, trying to attract them with aplomb. We learned that one of Mr Kennedy’s dogs, Ronan, now 13 years old and suffering from severe arthritis, had, in his heyday, killed a number of the family’s animals, including another emu and a turtle (not Caruthers).
Before long, the crow was nowhere to be seen, and Kennedy apologized, but was late for the TV spot.
A few hours later, at the airport, he sent me a series of photos and videos showing that the crows had descended en masse after we’d taken off.
“Now they’re working together,” Kennedy said. By the weekend, they were within reach.
He introduced the birds to his followers in a social media video this week: “I bring them home every morning on my balcony and let them meditate with me,” he said.
“President Edgar Allen,” one commenter wrote on Instagram.
