Hi-Desert Star “Focus”
By Stacy Moore
Smart, family-oriented and ravenous, ravens are taking over the skies and telephone wires across the desert. The question is whether more fragile desert dwellers — especially the desert tortoise — can survive their new neighbors.Common ravens were once migratory birds, but in the Western desert, they’ve quit migrating and made themselves at home permanently.
As the human population exploded in the desert, the ravens flew close behind. Across the Mojave Desert, their populations increased more than 700 percent in the last 40 years. Around Ridgecrest, the raven population has increased by 1,500 percent, according to Fedrick.
“They realized it is kind of nice in the desert now,” The Living Desert’s Allison Fedrick told people gathered for a lecture in the Hi-Desert Nature Museum Thursday. “We have golf courses, we have shade, we have all kinds of nice things for our ravens.”
9-month-old desert tortoise hatchling is small enough to easily fit in a human hand. Tortoise eggs are roughly the size of pingpong balls.
“Where there used to be 10 ravens, there are now 15,000 ravens,” she said.” And where there are 15,000 ravens, there is a huge problem for the animal species they prey on, like desert tortoises.
Elsewhere in the desert, they also eat fringe-toed lizards and sage grouse eggs. All three species are threatened by the ravenous ravens.
“For the desert tortoises, there’s no greater threat than the abundance of ravens,” Ron Berger, president of the nonprofit Desert Tortoise Preserve Committee, told Audubon magazine this year.
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