The forest raven is a passerine bird in the family Corvidae native to Tasmania and parts of southern Victoria. Populations are also found in parts of New South Wales, including Dorrigo and Armidale. Measuring 50–53 cm in length, it has all-black plumage, beak and legs.
About Forest raven in brief
The forest raven is a passerine bird in the family Corvidae native to Tasmania and parts of southern Victoria. Populations are also found in parts of New South Wales, including Dorrigo and Armidale. Measuring 50–53 cm in length, it has all-black plumage, beak and legs. As with the other two species of raven in Australia, its black feathers have grey bases. Adults have white irises; younger birds have dark brown and then hazel irises with an inner blue rim. The forest raven lives in a wide variety of habitats in Tasmania but is restricted to more closed forest on mainland Australia. It has been blamed for killing lambs and poultry and raiding orchards in Tasmania, and is unprotected under Tasmanian legislation. The nest is a bowl-shaped structure of sticks sited high in a tree. An omnivorous and opportunistic feeder, it eats a wide range of plant and animal material, as well as food waste from urban areas and roadkill. Preliminary genetic analysis of the three raven species showed the three belong to one lineage and the two crows to another. The genetic separation between the species is small and there was a suggestion the forest raven may be conspecific with the little crow. The term forest raven in Wales is colloquially applied to any species of Australian corvid or crow or little crow or all species of crow or crow in any Australian region. The species name derived from Tasmania, the type locality.
Gregory Mathews described the forestRaven as a distinct subspecies—Corvus marianae tasmanicus—of the Australian raven in 1912. In 1970, Rowley raised the forest Raven to species rank in 1970, noting there were no intermediate forms between it and the little raven and that it was clearly larger with a much more massive bill. He used Gmelin’s 1788 name, which took precedence by virtue of its age over Vigors and Horsfield’s description. In 1912 Scottish naturalist William Robert Ogilvie-Grant clarified the species as C. coronoides and C. cecilae. Subsequently, French-American ornithologist Charles Vaurie acted as First Revisor under Article 24 of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature Code and discarded C. australis as a junior homonym. He described a second subspecies, Corvus t asmanicus boreus, the same year, observing that southern Victoria has a very short tail compared with individuals from the northern New South South Wales population. The name forest raven was given to the species by Rowley in 1970. In 2012, Jørgen Jønsson and colleagues used nuclear DNA analysis using mitochondrial DNA to identify the closest Australian raven and the other forest raven and little crow to each other in the genus Børre Torresarcken. The two species are not closely related, and there is a suggestion that the two lineages are not related.
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This page is based on the article Forest raven published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
