Bulletin
February 20, 2025

Colorado:
We Need to Talk About Ravens

on Monday, February 24, 2025

7 p.m. MT, via Zoom

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Colorado bird authority Nathan Pieplow, a popular DFO speaker, returns in 2025 to challenge and enlighten us on an unexpected topic for a man best known for his command of bird sounds.

How do we tell Colorado’s two raven species, Chihuahuan and Common, apart from each other?

And why might we be doing a lousy job of it?

The story springs from a recent article by David Sibley, the renowned national birding artist, in North American Birds, the journal of the American Birding Association. Pieplow says Sibley proposed that at least half, and maybe up to 90%, of photos submitted to eBird from Colorado as Chihuahuan Ravens might be Common Ravens. “If this is true,” Pieplow adds, “then the conventional wisdom on raven status, distribution and identification needs some serious revision.”

Pieplow wrote the Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds (with separate volumes for western and eastern North America), and he is former editor of Colorado Field Ornithologists’ quarterly journal, Colorado Birds.

Based in Boulder, he is an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado.

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