54 



THR NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



Photograph by George Shiras. 3d 

 A CANADA JAY INVESTIGATING A HAUNCH OF VKNISON 



Meat is his favorite food and the sound of a hunter's gun seems to 

 attract rather than to frighten him, for lie has learned to associate tliat 

 sound with meat (see text, page 76, and iUustrations, pages Oi, 63). 



some inland valley, protected b)' ])roject- 

 ing' rock above, the nest is built in a niche 

 of the wall. Such situations are exceed- 

 ingly difficult to approach and the birds 

 cannot readily be disturbed by any crea- 

 ture not possessing wings. 



The cranny chosen for a nesting site 

 may be of any shape, and often must be 

 \vell filled in order to make a substantial 

 structure of proper size and sha]ie. The 

 nests of many birds show little variety in 

 their form or in the character of the mate- 

 rials used. This is not the case with the 

 ravens, for their ]iractica1 itnagination per- 

 mits them to adapt their nest to almost anv 

 kind of opening in the rock, and to use a 



wide variety of objects 

 in its construction. 



A few of the mate- 

 rials that have been 

 noted as component 

 parts of the nest are : 

 sticks, twigs, cow-ribs, 

 rope ends, ragged can- 

 vas, fragments of cloth 

 of various kinds, moss, 

 seaweed, roots of many 

 sizes, hay, cow dung, 

 clusters of hair from 

 the carcasses of deer, 

 horses, cows, and coy- 

 otes, and strips of hide 

 and shredded bark. 



That the raven's wit 

 sometimes fails him is 

 illustrated in an ac- 

 count by a California 

 ornithologist, who for 

 some time watched a 

 pah carrying sticks to 

 a certain point oti a 

 clitT. He says: "In- 

 ■\'estigation disclosed 

 an astonishing condi- 

 tion of attairs. The 

 daffy birds had been 

 trying to lodge the 

 foundations of a nest 

 in a sinall sloping crev- 

 ice where any sort of 

 lodgment was practi- 

 cally impossible. As a 

 result, every stick had 

 fallen, in its turn, until 

 a pile 6 feet in diam- 

 eter and not less than 

 2 feet high lay at the 

 —two hundred pounds' 

 weight of wood and not a mud-sill to the 

 good yet ! And about 40 feet along, under 

 the same cliff, was another stick pile, evi- 

 dently the accumulation of the preceding 

 season." 



The raven mates for life and a pair uses 

 the same nest season after season. These 

 liirds are extremelv devoted to their young 

 and to each other. Their domestic lives, 

 therefore, are very regtilar, well ordered, 

 and much more formal than those of the 

 average bird. 



The Family Corvidac in America in- 

 cludes two subfamilies. One is the javs 

 and magpies ; the other, ravens, crows, 



bottom of the cliff- 



