Natal dispersal is a well-studied phenomenon that can be divided into three stages: (1) starting from an area, (2) wandering to another area and (3) either settling in that area to breed or merely temporarily stopping there before continuing to wander. During the third phase, we can distinguish breeders from non-breeders, which may show similar or different patterns of space use. Breeding Common Ravens are territorial year-round; non-breeders are highly vagrant but may gather at food sources and night roosts for varying lengths of time. In contrast to the wandering phase, little is known about the space use of ravens at such ''stop'' sites. Here, we used radio telemetry to investigate the space use of 21 non-breeding ravens in the Austrian Alps during a stop stage at an anthropogenic food source. The tagged ravens were present in 69.2 % of the relocation attempts. They used only 27.0 ha (range 6.7-59.7 ha, 95 % utilisation distribution) of the study area, and their activity ranges strongly overlapped with each other. However, within this shared space, sub/adult non-breeders could be found at individually distinct locations, while juveniles showed similar spatial distributions. These results, combined with reported long-distance movements, underline the high behavioural flexibility of non-breeding ravens, which may be a reason for their success in very different habitats throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.