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RAVENS AT THE NEST, WITH SOME NOTES 

 ON THE HOODED CROW. 



BY 

 FRANCIS HEATHERLEY, F.R.C.S. 



Whilst engaged from April 7th to May 1st, 1909, in 

 trying to get photographs of Ravens at the nest, I had, 

 owing to their extreme reluctance to face the camera, 

 abundant opportunities to watch their habits. 



I shall not particularise the locality of the very 

 accessible nesting site beyond saying that it was in 

 Northumberland, and, accompanied by Messrs. E. Selous 

 and H. Earl, I arrived on the spot on April 7th. We 

 found that two chicks had been hatched out of four eggs 

 on March 20th, and that on April 4th some men had tried 

 to steal the young. They so broke up the nest with a 

 long pole that the young birds fell out during the night. 

 The shepherd on finding them next morning made a 

 nest for them on an old nesting site lower down. There 

 was plenty of material at hand, as the foot of the cliff is 

 littered, in places six inches deep, with dead heather- 

 stems. That the birds treated it as their natural nest 

 is, I think, shown by the fact that the mother Raven 

 carried away excrement after feeding the young, and 

 that the young themselves generally backed to its edge to 

 defalcate. 



In estimating the value of these notes it must be 

 remembered that photography being the primary object 

 there was necessarily a good deal of disturbance owing 

 to the erection of the camera twelve feet from the nest, 

 worked from a hiding tent thirty yards off. 



Compared with some Hooded Crows, which I had been 

 photographing under similar conditions, the Ravens 

 proved much more timid birds. The Hoodies, after 

 Earl had left me in the hiding tent, stalked him all over 

 the moor. So long as he lingered within half-a-mile or 

 so of the nest the male followed him about, occasionally 



