Don wrote:

>I vaguely remember a short thread about crows using their feet
>to carry things recently in tweeters.

Dennis, who enjoys diverse discourse in tweetes, sez:
>There was a thread about Northern Shrikes doing this, but I don't recall
>anything about crows.

I thought someone mentioned seeing a crow carry something at one of
your famous Urban Fillspaces, but I could be wrong...

We've just passed our Metro Greenspaces aquisition measure here in PDX,
but have yet to begin on Metro Fillspaces :)

>About the raven predation--I wouldn't put anything past birds as
>intelligent as our friends of the genus _Corvus_. It probably doesn't take
>much to extend predation on nestlings and fledglings to predation on
>adults, when it can be accomplished. Since Brewer's Blackbirds are fierce
>and constant mobbers of birds such as ravens, maybe the raven was able to
>pluck one out of the air when it dove at it. Ravens, like hawks, readily
>turn over on their back when another bird dives on them from above.

Ravens turn over on their back often. Hawks, as you mention, do it
in response to an attack, ravens often seem to do it for "fun", if
you'll pardon my use of the word.

The behavior is so frequent along mountain ridges that it is extremely
useful for those of us who do migrant counts of hawks. Our site at the
Goshutes features flights on windy, westerly days well over a mile to the
west of the ridge (up to five miles), with birds surfing on the strong
pressure ridge which builds along this long, fault-block mountain. The
raven's tendency to "flip" is useful when a bird is spotted miles
away and is head-on or just too far out to identify by shape.

I'll say one thing: the raven's snatching of this individual Brewer's
blackbird did nothing to calm them down! They chased the raven
clear across the field!

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>