NOTES ON THE FEEDING BEHAVIOR OF GULLS AND CROWS ON CLAMS AND CRABS AT THE YAQUINA ESTUARY, OREGON

Abstract

Crows (Grobecker and Pietsch 1978, Zach 1979) and gulls (Tinbergen 1961, Barash et al. 1975, Ingolfsson and Estrella 1978, Kent 1981, Maron 1982, Rockwell 1982) often drop hard-shelled food items to open them. Here, I describe some techniques that gulls and crows used to find and break naturally occurring clams (i.e., clams that were not made available by human clammers) and that gulls used to eat crabs.