The phrase "ability to forage" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing someone's or an animal's skill or capacity to search for and gather food in the wild.
Example: "The survival course taught us the ability to forage for edible plants and mushrooms in the forest."
Alternatives: "skill in foraging" or "capacity to gather food".
Differences in temperature, for example, can affect their ability to forage, reproduce and hibernate.
Pacheco, the woman living under brambles, was proud of her ability to forage and live alone.
Feeding bees supplements, rather than relying on their ability to forage in the wild, costs time and money.
The law also banned feeding these animals, on the theory that doing so might compromise their ability to forage naturally in future.
"They will be very hungry due to the poor weather hampering their ability to forage for food," says Richard Piddocke, a wasp expert.
His critics have said that not all captive dolphins can or should be released, since they lose the ability to forage for food and defend themselves after becoming accustomed to humans.
The authors also survey the existing literature to show a lack of trade-off among species in their abilities to forage for two forms of nitrogen, suggesting that nitrogen foraging efficiency is a generalized trait within a species.
For instance, a decade ago she showed that chicks lose the ability to multitask – to forage for food while keeping track of the threat from a predator - if they don't divide neural activity between their hemispheres.
Voigt (Voigt, 2013) studied flight performance in two species of wild Myotis with wing membrane defects and reported that injured animals performed fewer U-turns, suggesting flight membrane wounds have functional consequences by impacting the ability of bats to forage and evade aerial predators.
As snow thaws and freezes more often, a crusty barrier forms, hindering the ability of browsing animals to forage.
The researchers suggest that the ability to use polarized moonlight allows the species more time to forage and that the ability may be widespread in animals.
