Although ravens were once widespread throughout Appalachia they are now considered threatened or endangered in many states of the region. We document a nesting pair of common ravens in an area of southeastern Kentucky nearly 50 km northwest of traditional nesting sites. Further, we suggest several factors that may have influenced the patterns of raven abundance in the state and offer management...

Non-breeding common ravens (Corvus corax) live in complex social groups with a high degree of fission-fusion dynamics. They form valuable relationships and alliances with some conspecifics, while taking coordinated action against others. In ravens, affiliates reconcile their conflicts, console each other after conflicts with a third party, and provide each other with social support - all behavi...

Animals are predicted to selectively observe and learn from the conspecifics with whom they share social connections. Yet, hardly anything is known about the role of different connections in observation and learning. To address the relationships between social connections, observation and learning, we investigated transmission of information in two raven (Corvus corax) groups. First, we quantif...

Complex social life has been characterized as cognitively challenging and recently, social relationships such as long-term social bonds and alliances have been identified as key elements for brain evolution. Whereas good evidence is available to support the link between social relations and cognition in mammals, it remains unsatisfying for birds. Here we investigated the role of avian social bo...

The ability to follow gaze (i.e. head and eye direction) has recently been shown for social mammals, particularly primates. In most studies, individuals could use gaze direction as a behavioural cue without understanding that the view of others may be different from their own. Here, we show that hand-raised ravens not only visually co-orient with the look-ups of a human experimenter but also re...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2017.04.004 0003-3472/© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-n To explain reciprocity, direct or indirect, several proximate mechanisms have been proposed, yet little attention has been given to the specific underlying cognitive mechanisms. Regardless of what proximate rules underlie reciprocity, some kind...