Yesterday afternoon Brian and I were at Cranbourne Botanic gardens, sitting in a group of Spotted Gums near the Kids’ Garden Dinosaur construction. An adult Little Raven rested in a tree for a while, then came down to the ground and started searching the ground, not at all concerned by our presence. A young bird joined it (dark eye and dull head plumage) and also walked about. Then the adult flew to an adjacent steep bank, planted with shrubs and well-mulched. The young one joined it. Here the adult found something to eat – Brian said “It’s got something yellow in its beak!” I moved to look (the birds were half-hidden behind a shrub). Binoculars showed both were pecking at something pale and oval – it looked like a hen’s egg. It could have been a duck egg.
I started taking photos. (The pictures are not very good because both birds were visible only through a small gap between the shrubs.) Both birds consumed the contents – I could see strands of egg-white hanging from their bills. Eventually the broken egg-shell was discarded – I think some smaller pieces were swallowed. Then a second adult arrived and landed by the fence at the top of the bank, with something in its bill. My photos showed that this was a piece of meat (possibly stolen from a barbecue or donated by a picnicker). The young bird squawked and rushed to join it – the adult allowed it a peck at the food, but then went down the bank, dug a hole in the mulch and buried it.
I looked again at the first bird which was now digging quite a deep hole. I wondered if it had previously stolen the egg and cached it, and was now checking for other cached food.
I have known that corvids cache food since I was twelve, when we gave some bread to an unidentified ‘crow’, in the Perth Zoo. The bird walked off, and carried it to a tree with a small hole in its trunk about six inches from the ground, and carefully pushed the bread into it. Anthea Fleming
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