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OF RAVENS, WOLVES AND PEOPLE

April 12, 2021 @ 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM

Common Raven

Flathead Audubon will offer a special ZOOM presentation on Monday, April 12 at 7:00 PM featuring wildlife biologist John Marzluff, who will present a program on Ravens. Ravens are known to scavenge from wolves and people, but the degree to which they exploit these and other sources of food has not been studied in detail. In 2019, Matthias Loretto and John began tagging ravens in Yellowstone National Park with long-lasting GSM transmitters. After tagging about 60 ravens and relating their movements to those of people and wolves, they are gaining an appreciation of the ravens’ reliance on both providers. The presentation will describe the movements of territorial and non-breeding ravens and relate these to wolf- and human-provisioned foods. During the study, they observed ravens using wolf kills, but their discovery appears more incidental than a result of following or purposeful search. As we begin to quantify the relationship between wolves and ravens, we may learn more about their synchrony, but at present it appears to be weak, with discovery of kills occurring during the day rather than after communal roosting. Ravens made extensive use of ponds, dumps, agriculture, road kills, and hunter offal. Territorial ravens have extensive knowledge of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and exploit areas in excess of 6500 square miles to obtain their yearly needs.

John Marzluff received an undergraduate degree in wildlife biology at the University of Montana. He went on to receive a master’s degree and a PhD from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He has been on the Wildlife Science faculty in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington since 1997. His specialty is on the ecology and behavior of jays, crows and ravens.

Time: April 12, 2021, 7:00 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada)
To Join the Zoom Meeting email info@flatheadaudubon.org for information on how to log in.

FAS had a great program at the March meeting: Trumpeter Swan Ecology and Reintroduction, by Franz
Inglefinger. If you missed that presentation or want to see it again, you can view a replay of it at
flatheadaudubon.org/videos. Videos of earlier FAS meeting presentations are also available there.

Details

Date:
April 12, 2021
Time:
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Website:
www.flatheadaudubon.org

Venue

ZOOM