Scientists Thought Ravens Followed Wolves for Food. They Were Wrong. Ravens Predict Them

New GPS tracking suggests ravens navigate Yellowstone using a mental map of wolf kills.

Whenever a wolf makes a successful kill, it seems like a flock of ravens is mere moments away. Biologists assumed the explanation was simple and the birds simply followed wolves constantly and waited for a meal.

A new study suggests that is only a small part of the story. By tracking ravens, wolves, and cougars across Yellowstone for two and a half years, researchers found that ravens rarely followed wolves over long distances. Instead, the birds returned again and again to areas where wolf kills were more likely to happen.

The findings suggest that ravens use their particularly remarkable memory and navigation to search for carrion across vast landscapes. Rather than acting as passive followers of predators, they appear to build a mental map of where predation is most likely to happen, and subsequently provide them with food.

“They can fly six hours non-stop, straight to a kill site,” said Dr. Matthias Loretto, the study’s first author.

The Scavenger’s Point of View

The study tracked 69 ravens, 20 wolves, and 11 cougars in and around Yellowstone National Park over two and a half years. The team collected more than 646,000 raven GPS locations, along with tens of thousands of wolf and cougar positions, and compared those movements with confirmed predator kills.

Researchers found that ravens were not usually tailing predators across the landscape. Instead, they seemed to remember where carcasses tended to cluster in their vicinity and returned to these regularly. The birds were so good at this that when they appear at a kill site, it almost seems like clockwork.

Wolves returned to Yellowstone in the mid-1990s after a 70-year absence, and conservationists have followed their lives in extraordinary detail ever since. Each winter, about a quarter of the park’s wolves wear GPS collars, creating a rare natural laboratory for mapping predator movement and kill sites.

“We all assumed that the birds had a very simple rule; just stick close to the wolves,” said Dan Stahler, a Yellowstone biologist.

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“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,” he added.

While the Yellowstone wolves were already tracked before this study, the researchers had to trap and tag ravens themselves. That was not easy.

“Ravens are so observant of the landscape that they don’t step into traps easily,” Loretto said in the press release. The team disguised traps with details that fit the setting, including trash and fast food near campsites. “Or else the ravens would suspect that something was off and wouldn’t come near it,” Stahler said.

The birds then told their own story.

Across the entire study, the researchers found just one clear case of a raven following a wolf for more than one kilometer and more than one hour. In that case, a vagrant raven and a wolf moved together for about four kilometers over two hours. While ravens clearly can follow wolves, they rarely seem to do it as a long-distance strategy.

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A Map Made from Memory

The GPS data showed their main pattern for finding scavaging opportunities. Ravens repeatedly visited areas where wolf kills were common. Some flew highly direct routes over long distances, traveling up to 155 kilometers in a single day toward places where carcasses were likely to turn up. Between those visits, some birds spent most of their time far from wolves. One raven associated with wolves on 48 separate days. Intervals between visits to wolves for all ravens ranged from 15 days on average to as long as 363 days.

That behavior makes sense once you stop thinking of a carcass as a random event. A single kill is hard to predict. But over months and years, wolf kills cluster in certain places. In Yellowstone, wolves often catch prey in flatter, open, snow-covered valleys near streams and roads. Earlier work has shown that predation risk for elk can be far higher in some of these zones than across the broader landscape. To a raven, such places may function like a shifting pantry: never guaranteed, but worth checking every time.

“We already knew that ravens can remember stable food sources, like landfills,” Loretto said. “What surprised us is that they also seem to learn in which areas wolf kills are more common. A single kill is unpredictable, but over time some parts of the landscape are more productive than others — and ravens appear to use that pattern to their advantage.”

The birds still used immediate clues. A raven nearby may notice wolf movement, hear howling, watch other scavengers, or follow short-range social cues. But at larger scales, it’s their memory that seems to guide the first decision of where to search for scraps.

This may explain why ravens associated more strongly with wolves than cougars. In the study, ravens were more likely to co-occur with wolves than with cougars, and GPS-tagged ravens used 48.5% of wolf kills compared with 24.8% of cougar kills during the first seven days after death. Wolves hunt in packs, often in open terrain, and leave large carcasses exposed. Cougars hunt alone, often in rugged or forested places, and commonly cover their kills. A cougar kill is harder to see, harder to predict, and harder to steal from.

Smarter Than “Follow the Food”

Ravens have long been famous for their intelligence. They cache food, remember hiding places, steal from others, and respond to what other animals know or might see. Studies have even suggested that some raven abilities resemble future planning seen in great apes.

This study adds a wilder kind of tool in the raven’s cognitive repertoire: not just remembering a buried snack, but learning the habits of another species across a vast landscape.

“Ravens can cover large distances by flying, and they seem to have a good memory, so they don’t need to constantly follow wolves in order to profit from the predators,” Loretto 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,” said senior author Prof. John M. Marzluff of the University of Washington.

The findings appeared in the journal Science.

This article originally appeared in May 11, 2026, and was updated with new info before republishing.