Why crows hold funerals for their dead

There's an unusual but known behavior among crows, that they gather around the bodies of their dead. A crow dead on the street or in a field will be surrounded by a few to a dozen or more crows, all seeming to contemplate their fallen comrade. The notion of crow funerals has been documented but not necessarily understood, so University of Washington biologists Kaeli Swift and John Marzluff decided to create experiments to find out what exactly is happening.

If you've ever read about experiments with crow behavior, you'll know the experiments often involve researchers wearing incredibly creepy masks. Crows learn to recognize individual faces and teach their offspring who (or what) to be concerned about. And because crows have a long memory, a researcher could be disliked by local crows for decades. To avoid a long-running feud, the Washington research volunteers donned masks. They also wore signs that explained that the exercise was all part of a crow study. (The signs were for humans, of course, not the crows, but not a bad idea: Along with the creepy masks, researchers carried around a dead crow. The things researchers do for science…)