208 BULLETIN 191, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



Food. — Ravens are not at all particular about their choice of food; 

 almost anything edible will do, from carrion to freshly killed small 

 mammals and birds or birds' eggs, other small vertebrates, insects, and 

 other small forms of animal life; garbage and various forms of veg- 

 etable material are also welcome. 



No thorough analysis of the year-round food of the raven seems to 

 have been made, but A. L. Nelson (1934) has published a thorough 

 study of the early summer food of this raven in southeastern Oregon, 

 "based on examination of the stomach contents of 18 adult and 66 nest- 

 ling birds, the latter representing 18 broods." Bird remains occurred in 

 21 stomachs, the bulk percentage amounting to 6.37 for nestlings and 

 7.72 for adults. "Shell fragments of birds' eggs were noted in 14 

 stomachs, forming by volume 2.03 percent of the bulk." But this 

 probably does not come anywhere near representing the number of eggs 

 destroyed, for bits of shell are seldom eaten and egg contents are not 

 easily detected. Small mammals formed the largest percentage of the 

 food, 34.26 percent for adults and young combined. "Examination 

 showed that thirty-five of the sixty-six nestlings, or 53 percent, were 

 fed on rabbits, while eight of the eighteen adults, or 44 percent, had 

 fed on these animals." These were mostly young rabbits, and probably 

 some of them were carrion. 



Amphibians formed 7.40 percent of the food of the young and 3.62 

 percent of the food of the adults. "The total percentage of reptile food 

 for nestlings amounted to 6.43, for adults 0.84, and for all birds 

 5.23. * ♦ * Insects, as a group, stand next in importance to the rabbit 

 as a food item, amounting to about 33 percent of the total. The 

 adults had a greater percentage of insects in their diet than did the 

 nestlings, the percentage for the former being 48.56, and for the latter 

 29.74. ♦ ♦ ♦ In the order of their importance in the diet, from the 

 percentage standpoint, representatives of the following seven orders of 

 insects were identified: Homoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, Coleoptera, 

 Lepidoptera, Orthoptera, and Heteroptera. The orders Orthoptera 

 and Heteroptera were so sparsely represented as to be insignificant, 

 together amounting to less than ^ of 1 percent of the total diet. 



"* * * The only vegetable item taken by adults was corn. It was 

 present in two stomachs, being recorded to the extent of 35 percent 

 in one and 2 percent in the other. Of the nestlings, eight stomachs 

 contained vegetable material, two stomachs containing com to the 

 extent of 42 and 33 percent, respectively, and three, containing oats 

 in percentages of 62, 15, and 8, respectively." Thus it appears that, 

 although some of these stomachs contained rather high percentages 

 of these grains, the number of birds involved was so small that "the 



