26 April 2008, Baseball Field, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, San Francisco County, California. Today I took my Ornithology class on a field trip to Golden Gate Park. We observed this Common Raven pulling on the tail of a live Botta Pocket Gopher. The Raven did not kill gopher, but pecked at it and seemed to try to swallow it alive head-first, but without success. The Raven eventually left the gopher which allowed close approach. The gopher seemed sick but not obviously injured. We left it to Nature to take its course. The subspecies C. c. clarionensis is the smallest in North America and is confined to Northern California and Baja. (A. M. Rea 1986. Corvus corax, geographic variation. Pp. 65–66 in The known birds of North and Middle America. Part I. A. R. Phillips, Denver, CO.). A recent study (Omland, K. E., C. L. Tarr, W. I. Boarman, J. M. Marzluff, and R. C. Fleischer. 2000. Cryptic genetic variation and paraphyly in ravens. Proc. Royal Society of London B 267:2475-2482) revealed a deep genetic break between ravens from California and ravens from throughout the rest of North America and the world. California populations were even more distinct from other populations than the Chihuahuan raven (Corvus cryptoleucus) suggesting a potential future split of the California Raven population into a separate species. Post processing includes noise reduction using the "Noise Ninja" Photoshop plugin. Panasonic DMC-LZ5 / Nikon FS 3 / 30XWA / hand-held, no adapter.