216 NORTH AMERICAN FAUNA 61, FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE 



Corvus corax: Common Raven 

 Corvus corax principalis 



Attu: Kd-ga-lach 

 Atka: Kang-lach' 

 Russian: Woron (Pleske) 



Voron (Stejneger) 

 Chukchi: Uedlje (Palmen) 



Pleske applies the Russian name to Corvus corax corax, 

 Stejneger applies it to Corvus behringianus, but, of course, the 

 Russian common name has a general application. 



The raven is universally distributed throughout this entire dis- 

 trict, from Bristol Bay, Seward, and the Kodiak-Afognak group 

 westward to Attu Island. We noted them at the Barren Islands, 

 Shumagins, Amak Island, and throughout the Aleutians, where 

 at least one or two were found at nearly every island. Gabrielson 

 observed them in the Semidis. 



In his field notes for 1911, Wetmore described the actions of 

 numerous ravens at the village on Unalaska Island, where they 

 were very tame and acted as scavengers. Turner also (1886) 

 found this bird to be a scavenger about villages in the Aleutian 

 Islands. In 1925, when I collected several specimens of the 

 Alaska brown bear in the mountains west of Pavlof Volcano, 

 ravens gathered in large numbers to feed on the carcasses. They 

 also were seen along salmon streams, where they probably find 

 fragments of salmon left by bears, just as the gulls do. And they 

 join the gulls in gleaning food, dead or alive, on reefs or beaches 

 at low tide. 



During the war, the military establishments from Dutch Harbor 

 to Attu furnished abundant garbage for ravens and sea gulls. 



Ravens are by no means exclusively carrion eaters. Pellets 

 found on Amak Island contained remains of field mice, Microtus, 

 and sea urchins. At St. Catherine Cove, Unimak Island, a raven 

 was flushed from the partly eaten body of a female willow 

 ptarmigan. They have been reported as killing incubating birds 

 on their nests, and this may have been an example of that oc- 

 currence, though the evidence was not conclusive. 



Cahn, at Dutch Harbor, says "Twice I have watched a raven 

 kill a rat, the second time a young Bald Eagle was also watch- 

 ing, and when the rat was dead, the eagle took it away from the 

 raven without argument." 



At Kanaga Island, the caretaker of fox-raising operations said 

 he had trapped about 150 ravens in the previous winter. He 

 stated that ravens will kill blue foxes in traps and that he has 

 found remains of blue-fox pups in raven nests. Whether adult 



