HQ Team
March 15, 2026: Ravens remember where wolves are most likely to make kills and will return to those kill sites from far away — flying up to six hours non-stop, according to a study.
The study, led by the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (Germany), together with other international institutions, revealed that rather than tracking predators directly over long distances, ravens repeatedly revisited specific areas where wolf kills were common.
Some of them flew up to 155 kilometres in a single day, moving along highly directional paths toward places where a carcass was likely to appear—even though the exact timing of a kill was unpredictable.
Ravens use spatial memory and navigation to decide where to search in the first place, sometimes across tens or even hundreds of kilometres.
To gain a complete picture of raven behaviour, the team over two-and-a-half years, attached tiny global positioning system tracking devices to 69 ravens, “which is just an insane number,” said Dr Matthias Loretto, the study’s first author, who started the research while at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.
Yellowstone National Park
The study’s main focus was on Yellowstone National Park in the US, where wolves were reintroduced in the mid-90s after a 70-year absence. The park’s wolves are monitored by tracking collars, which are attached to a quarter of the wolf population in any given year.
For the ravens, it’s a profitable foraging strategy, as the wolves invariably produce food that the birds can scavenge. “We all assumed that the birds had a very simple rule; just stick close to the wolves,” said Dr Dan Stahler, a biologist from Yellowstone National Park.
But the assumption was untested.
After a detailed analysis of the movement data, the pattern became clear. Rather than tracking predators directly over long distances, ravens repeatedly revisited specific areas where wolf kills were common. Ravens were far more likely to visit areas with a history of frequent wolf kills than areas where kills were rare, suggesting that they learn and remember the long-term “resource landscape” created by wolves.
‘Birds arrive quickly’
“We didn’t know what ravens were capable of because nobody had ever put them at the center. Nobody had taken the scavenger’s point of view,” Stahler said. “Once we realised that ravens are not following wolves over long distances, we couldn’t explain why the birds still arrive so quickly at wolf kills.”
Dr Stahler, who has tracked the park’s wolves since reintroduction, said that ravens appear to seek out the company of wolves: “You see them flying directly above travelling packs or hopping close behind wolves as they take down prey.”
First author Loretto said: “Ravens can cover large distances by flying, and they seem to have a good memory, so they don’t need to follow wolves to profit from the predators constantly.”
“Ravens are so observant of the landscape that they don’t step into traps easily,” he said. To trap the birds for tagging, researchers meticulously matched the trap setup with the surroundings.
For example, traps set near campsites had to be disguised with rubbish and fast-food bait, “or else the ravens would suspect that something was off and wouldn’t come near it,” said Loretto, now a scientist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna.
No particular pack
In addition to tracking ravens, researchers included movement data from 20 of Yellowstone’s collared wolves. They monitored the animals during winter, when ravens most often associate with wolves, recording GPS locations at intervals of up to 30 minutes for ravens and up to one hour for wolves. They also included data on where and when wolves killed prey, primarily elk, bison, and deer.
“To find wolf kills locally, ravens likely use short-range cues, like monitoring wolf behaviour or listening to wolf howling,” Loretto said. But at a broader scale, the pattern is clear: memory first, cues second.
Prof John M. Marzluff of the University of Washington said: “What our study clearly shows is that ravens are flexible in where they decide to feed. They don’t stay tied to a particular wolf pack.
“With their sharp senses and memory of past feeding locations, they can choose among many foraging opportunities far and wide. This changes how we think about how scavengers find food—and suggests we may have underestimated some species for a long time.”
The study was published in Science.
