Animals, including us, engage in displacement activities—like grooming, scratching of the head, pecking at the ground—when competing stimuli overwhelm the system. Anxious animals often engage in displacement activities to excess, an anxious parrot liable to preen itself to baldness.

Beak wiping can be a displacement activity in birds, too. Nevermore-A-Matic tells our stories about the end of the world to ravens through coded beak wipes. The code is a human signal layered on a machine signal on top of an avian signal and, almost indubitably, the birds don’t get the full message.

But because ravens have a theory of mind, observing this object that incessantly wipes its beak, they might still come away with the sense that the object is subject to very great anxiety. About something.

So the robot will have succeeded in inserting our anxiety about the end of the world into whatever place it is perched, often that is a “pristine” wilderness, a landscape that in our imagination we view as untouched by our activities, like the remote arctic of Finland or deep in the high desert of California.