492 
BIRDS OF NEW MEXICO 
probably horned larks, birds’ eggs, a small lizard, beetles, grasshoppers, and “jar 
flies.” 
General Habits. —The smallest of the ravens, the White-necked 
is little larger than the Western Crow, but its voice, while not so loud 
as that of the American Raven, has the characteristic raven hoarse¬ 
ness, and when it is perching on a yucca or a fence post the white bases 
of the feathers of the neck sometimes show. It is a bird of the desert, 
and the grim Jornado del Muerto is said by Mr. Ligon to be the greatest 
White-necked Raven region he has ever seen. Here the birds nest, as 
in other deserts, mainly in tree yuccas. Near Mesilla Park they nest 
in big trees along the river, and in fall and winter, while bivouacking 
there, fly out widely over the valley and mesa. In the fall, Mr. Ligon 
says, they collect in flocks and are then generally to be found along 
the irrigated valleys where they get food. 
In the fall migration in Cochise County, Arizona, Mr. Swarth 
and Mr. Willard witnessed a remarkable migratory movement. It was 
on the second Monday of November, 1911, that it began, the White- 
necks of the region gathering and migrating in one immense flock, 
extending nearly 3 miles along the foothills of the Dragoon Mountains. 
“There did not seem to be any regular flight/” Mr. Willard states, “but 
a sort of general slow movement to the south. The birds were present 
in many thousands and it was two days before the last stragglers 
disappeared” (1912c, p. 107). An unusually cold winter apparently 
kept them away, the first returning on the twenty-second of February. 
At Deming, as at El Paso, where they may be seen in and near 
town all winter, they act as scavengers, walking about on the main 
streets and visiting the dumping grounds, picking up what they can 
find. They “feed along the railroad tracks to within a few yards of 
the depot, apparently paying little attention to the rush of traffic 
about them.” A pair which had become inured to civilization actually 
built their nest on the insulator brackets of a telegraph pole by a rail¬ 
road track, where it was photographed. Along the line of the South¬ 
ern Pacific Railroad in both Arizona and New Mexico, Mr. Ligon 
found great numbers of them on March 11, 1918, and he says that they 
seem to follow the railroad lines to get the scraps thrown from the 
diners. But they have not abandoned the role of hunter. In one 
place he came on six of them in company with two Swainson’s Hawks 
pursuing one small jack rabbit. 
The opposed good and bad food habits of the White-necked Raven in 
the Pecos Valley provide Mr. McAtee with a text for a most important 
discussion of the basic principles of economic ornithology. One man, 
whom he calls Mr. John Doe, “declared that without the Ravens it 
would not be possible to raise a crop of alfalfa seed in the Pecos Valley, 
inasmuch as the Ravens are the only control which they have for the 
