14 March 2025

I’ve seen a lot of ravens in the past two weeks — 11 in Minnesota, two as we landed at Pittsburgh airport, and one over Aspinwall on Tuesday. When I found Vance Crofoot’s 3-minute video explaining raven territories I was fascinated.

Here’s what we learned:

• Immature ravens spend 3 to 4 years in large flocks of young ravens. On reaching adulthood, ravens pick a mate and go off to claim a territory.
• Adult pairs display their territorial boundary by flying along the border.
• Ravens know their neighbors and will sometimes fly with them along the mutual border.
• Ravens help their neighbors drive out predatory threats.
• Other ravens are not allowed to land in an adult pair’s territory. If they do they are challenged.
• When a pair has chicks they aggressively drive out predators.
• Once the chicks can fly, neighboring families meet up for “play dates” with their kids.
• Youngsters also can bring friends home to play with.
• Juvenile ravens stay with their parents for about 7 months. At the end of that time their parents aggressively drive them out of the territory.

The first comment on the video points out how different ravens are from crows!

Very informative! It’s interesting that the intergenerational behaviour is different from crows whose juveniles hang around longer and actively assist their parents in raising the next chicks and fledglings. The ravens’ cooperative behaviours are very well adapted to their needs and types of threats.

— Comment on the video from @julieprior3126

And why are there so many ravens in this video? Southern California has a lot more ravens than we do in the East, as shown on this eBird map.