Ravens are among the smartest birds on the planet. The intelligence of ravens as tricksters, messengers and observers has been described since time immemorial with myths and legends around the world. On the northwest coast ravens are prominent in the crests and stories of the indigenous peoples.

A new study published in the journal Science on March 12, 2026, provides more proof just how smart ravens are as observers.

A team of scientists tracked ravens and grey wolves, along with cougars,  with GPS in Yellowstone National Park in the US. They found that the ravens don’t just follow wolves to a kill, as many have thought. Instead, the ravens use aerial surveillance and spatial memory to deduce where the wolves most often make a kill, so they can zero in and scavenge.

They found that the ravens just weren’t following the predators; instead, they regularly returned to sites where they had encountered wolf kills before.

The study also looked at the interactions between ravens and cougars, which showed the that ravens more likely scavenge wolf kills than cougar kills.

The study tracked 69 ravens, 20 wolves, and 11 cougars in Yellowstone by GPS devices over two and half years. The scientists found ravens rarely follow predators over large distances, as many have assumed over time.

Instead, the study showed ravens routinely revisited sites where wolf kills were common, often returning from distances of up to 155 kilometers to find carrion. That means the ravens appear to remember potential sources of carrion from previous encounters with wolves or their kills. The scientists suggest that spatial memory and navigation skills play a considerably greater role than previously assumed among scavengers.

Ravens have been observed cueing on and flying with traveling wolves, following wolf tracks in the snow, orienting toward wolf howling and landing to gather rapidly at fresh wolf kills.
These actions led to a belief that ravens directly followed wolves as a winter foraging strategy. Winter is a time when finding carrion is difficult but important for survival. Many scavengers do follow large carnivores so they can reduce search time and watch for recently made kills.

When ravens visit previously successful sites, which are cognitively more demanding, that means the visits require predicting the behavior and space use of another species (in this case the wolves)  and the distribution of their kills.  Ravens like other corvids including crows and jays use spatial memory to retrieve food from their caches and steal from others' caches.

The study notes that the future-planning abilities of ravens are like those of great apes. The study wanted to see just how ravens could predict future wolf kills.

Large predators like wolves and cougars are usually territorial and kill within a certain range. For the Yellowstone study, the scientists identified two groups of ravens; 26 were year-round territorial residents within or close to wolf territories and 43 were vagrant nonterritorial wanderers throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. They divided the ravens between territorial and vagrant ravens based on the repeated use of the same night roosts for one group compared to “nomadic movements with frequent changes of night roosts” for the vagrants. During winter, both territorial and vagrant ravens travelled over greater distances compared to the movement of resident carnivores.

Although ravens could follow wolves over considerable distances and extended periods; the study found that was rare. The study found that over the 2.5 years of tracking, there was only one instance of long-distance following and that was by a vagrant raven and a lone wolf that moved together in the same direction for four kilometres over a period of two hours. That vagrant raven had come from a human dominated area, followed the wolf, roosted overnight while the wolf moved on. The raven then returned to the human dominated part of Yellowstone.

The study found no cases of ravens following cougars. Cougars kill less frequently than wolves, usually forage alone unless it is a mother cougar with kittens, cover their kills between feedings to conceal them from scavengers. Cougars are ambush and stalking predators and hunt mainly in rugged, forested terrain.

Just when or how wolves could make a kill is unpredictable, but the study found that the chances ravens finding and scavenging a wolf kill was higher than random chance. Wolf packs are relatively conspicuous during hunting, as they operate in groups, mainly in open areas and sometimes provide cues by howling when initiating a hunt or near a kill.

Wolf kills are clustered in particular areas of northern Yellowstone and not randomly distributed. The study proposes that ravens find kills by relying on spatial memory, possibly represented as a cognitive map of long-term average wolf presence and wolf kills.

The GPS study showed that raven scavenging was significantly higher in areas with greater recorded wolf kill abundance than in areas where kills were rare. This indicates that ravens may learn and remember areas where wolf kills are abundant and where they are not.

The study also compared how ravens traveled long distances toward wolf kills with their travel toward landfills, sewage ponds, or urban areas, which are ravens’ most predictable source of food in the winter. The ravens went for both human sites and wolf kills. The territorial ravens moved more frequently between both sites than the vagrants who were not as familiar with the area.

The scientists report (as usual) that more studies are needed, concluding that while “the fine-scale search strategies of ravens remain unresolved, their foraging success relies not only on real-time cues but also on the predictability of resource-rich areas, and these strategies are not mutually exclusive. The fact that scavengers can feed for several days on the remains of large ungulate carcasses, such as those typically provided by wolves, alleviates the necessity of being at the right place at the right time.”

As well as remembering specific locations to exploit human dominated food sites, ravens also appear to learn that  the broader landscape areas can be associated with increased carrion availability and presence of wolves.

Ravens can navigate equally efficiently from distant areas to human related food sites as they do to areas with a high number of wolf kills, “For local searches on a finer scale, ravens likely rely on perceptual cues, including social information from other scavengers (e.g., local enhancement, flight paths, raven vocalizations) as well as short-distance following and monitoring of wolves hunting and howling. The combination of site revisiting and high wolf abundance can make wolf kills a highly predictable food source for ravens and possibly other scavenger species.”

The study concludes by saying “Knowledge of a resource landscape by ravens aligns with similar strategies observed in blue whales tracking spring phytoplankton blooms or chimpanzees using long-term spatial memory to revisit fruit-bearing trees. The same mechanism might also be used by other avian scavenger species with high movement capacity (e.g., other corvids, vultures, eagles) for efficient carrion detection.”

You can listen to the Science Podcast What Alaska’s eroding coastline says about Earth’s future, and how Yellowstone ravens use their smarts to find wolf kills

The article is "Ravens anticipate wolf kill sites across broad scales" by Matthias-Claudio Loretto, Kristina B. Beck, Douglas W. Smith, Daniel R. Stahler, Lauren E. Walker, Martin Wikelski, Thomas Mueller Kamran Safi and John M. Marzluff
Science
Vol. 391, No. 6790