STICKING TO THE RAPTOR DIET

The diet of British birds of prey in the distant past was very different from that of their descendants.

- ERIC A. POWELL

A team led by archaeologist Juliette Waterman of the University of Reading discovered surprising disparities between bones of raptors such as red kites found at Roman and medieval archaeological sites and those of the same birds that lived during what scholars call the modern period, which began in the seventeenth century. Chemical analysis of the bones showed that in the Roman period, the birds' diet included meat from domesticated mammals such as sheep, cows, and pigs, which they took from scraps of human food waste. The team found that by the medieval period, raptors were dining o