This virtual program is brought to you by our friends to the north: Flathead Audubon!!!

Of ravens, wolves and people with John Marzluff

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 de-tail. In 2019, Matthias Loretto and John began tagging ravens in Yellowstone National Park with long-lasting GSM transmitters. After tagging >60 ravens and re-lating their movements to those of people and wolves, they are gain-ing an appreciation of their reli-ance on both providers. They will describe the movements of territo-rial and non-breeding ravens and relate these to wolf- and human-provisioned foods. They will focus on the exploits of individual birds to emphasize variability. 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 pre-sent it appears to be weak, with discovery of kills oc-curring during the day rather than after communal roosting. Ravens made extensive use of anthropogen-ic resources, including direct handouts, waste water treatment ponds, dumps, agriculture, road-kills, and hunter offal. Territorial ravens have extensive knowledge of the Greater Yellowstone Eco-system and exploit areas in ex-cess of 6500 square miles to ob-tain their yearly needs. 

John Marzluff received an undergraduate degree in wildlife biology at the University of Mon-tana. He went on to receive an masters degree and a PhD from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He has been on the Wild-life 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. 

How to Attend the April 12 FAS General Meeting 

Time: April 12, 2021, 7:00 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) 

Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87984683083 

Meeting ID: 879 8468 3083 

+1 253 215 8782 

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