What crows teach us about death

Rituals for the dead span much of the natural world, seen in practices from humans and elephants to bees, dolphins and beyond. With charm and playful insight, animal behaviorist Kaeli Swift delves into the life (and death) habits of crows and shares what their responses could reveal about our own relationship to mortality.

Whether we want to or not,
humans spend a great deal of time

considering death.

And it's possible we've been doing so
since shortly after homo sapiens

first began roaming the landscape.

After all, the first
intentional human burial

is thought to have occurred
around 100,000 years ago.

What might those early people
have been thinking

as they took the time
to dig into the earth,

deposit the body

and carefully cover it up again?

Were they trying
to protect it from scavengers

or stymie the spread of disease?

Were they trying to honor the deceased?

Or did they just not want
to have to look at a dead body?

Without the advent of a time machine,

we may never know for sure
what those early people were thinking,

but one thing we do know
is that humans are far from alone

in our attention towards the dead.

Like people, some animals,

including the corvids, the family of birds

that houses the crows,
ravens, magpies and jays,

also seem to pay
special attention to their dead.

In fact, the rituals of corvids
may have acted as the inspiration

for our own.

After all, it was the raven
that God sent down

to teach Cain how to bury
his slain brother Abel.

But despite this clear recognition
by early people that other animals

attend to their dead,

it's only fairly recently that science
has really turned its attention

towards this phenomenon.

In fact, a formal name for this field --
comparative thanatology --

wasn't first introduced until 2016.

In this growing field, we are beginning
to appreciate what a rich place

the natural world is with respect to how
other animals interact with their dead,

and it's in this growing body of knowledge

that that time machine
to our early ancestors might be possible.

So what are we learning
in this growing field?

Well, right now we can split
our understanding into two main groups.

In the first, we have animals that display
stereotyped, predictable behaviors

towards their dead,

and for whom much
of what we understand about them

comes from experimental studies.

This group includes things
like the social insects --

bees and ants and termites --

and for all of these animals,
colony hygiene is of critical importance,

and so as a result these animals
display rigorous undertaking behaviors

in response to corpses.

For example, they may physically
remove carcasses from the colony.

They may consume them.

They may even construct tombs.

We see similar hygiene-driven responses
in some colony-living mammals.

Rats, for example,
will reliably bury cage-mates

that have been dead for 48 hours.

In our other group, we have animals
that display more variable,

perhaps more charismatic behaviors,

and for whom much
of what we understand about them

comes from anecdotes

by scientists or other observers.

This is the animals whose death behaviors

I suspect might be more familiar to folks.

It includes organisms like elephants,

which are well-known
for their attendance to their dead,

even in popular culture.

In fact, they're even known
to be attracted

to the bones of their deceased.

It also includes animals like primates,

which display a wide variety
of behaviors around their dead,

from grooming them

to prolonged attention towards them,

guarding them,

even the transportation of dead infants.

And that's actually a behavior
we've seen in a number of animals,

like the dolphins for example.

You may remember the story of Tahlequah,

the orca in the resident J pod
in the Puget Sound,

who during the summer of 2018

carried her dead calf

for an unprecedented 17 days.

Now, a story like that

is both heartbreaking and fascinating,

but it offers far more questions
than it does answers.

For example, why
did Tahlequah carry her calf

for such a long period of time?

Was she just that stricken with grief?

Was she more confused
by her unresponsive infant?

Or is this behavior
just less rare in orcas

than we currently understand it to be?

But for a variety of reasons,

it's difficult to do the kinds
of experimental studies

in an animal like an orca,
or many of these other large mammals,

that might elucidate
those kinds of questions.

So instead, science is turning
to an animal whose behaviors around death

we've been thinking about since BCE:

the crows.

Like insects and primates,

crows also seem to pay
special attention to their dead.

Typically, this manifests
as the discovering bird alarm calling,

like you can see in this photo,

followed by the recruitment
of other birds to the area

to form what we call a mob.

But it can be a little
different than that too.

For example, I've had people share with me
seeing prolonged silent vigils by crows

in response to deceased or dying crows.

I've even had people tell me
of witnessing crows place objects

like sticks and candy wrappers
on or near the bodies of dead crows.

And this mix of observations
puts these birds

in a really important place in our scheme,

because it suggests on the one hand
they might be like the insects,

displaying these
very predictable behaviors,

but on the other hand
we have this handful of observations

that are more difficult to explain
and feel a bit more like what we see

in some of the mammals
like primates and elephants.

And like those animals, crows share
an extremely large relative brain size

and the kinds of dynamic social lives
that might invite more complexity

in how they respond to their dead.

So I wanted to try to understand
what was going on

when crows encounter a dead crow,

and what this might teach us
about the role of death in their world,

and possibly the worlds
of other animals as well,

even those early versions of ourselves.

There's a number of different ways
that we could explain

why crows might be
attracted to their dead.

For example, maybe
it's a social opportunity,

a way for them to explore
why that individual died,

who they were

and what impact this is going to have
on the neighborhood moving forward.

Maybe it's an expression of grief,

like our own contemporary funerals.

Or maybe it's a way that they learn
about danger in their environment.

While all of those explanations
are worth pursuing,

and certainly not mutually exclusive,

they're not all testable
scientific questions.

But that idea that dead crows
might act as cues of danger, that is.

So as a graduate student,
I wanted to explore that question,

particularly with respect to two ideas.

The first was whether they
might be able to learn new predators,

specifically people,

based on their association
with dead crows.

And the second was
if they might learn places

associated with where
they find crow bodies.

So to do this, I would go out into
some unsuspecting Seattle neighborhood

and I would start to feed
a breeding pair of crows

over the course of three days,

and this provided a baseline

for how quickly the crows
would come down to a food pile,

which, as you'll see in a minute,
was really important.

Then, on the fourth day,

we would have our funeral.

This is Linda.

Linda is one of seven masks whose job
was to stand there for 30 minutes

with her little hors d'oeuvre
plate of dead crow

while I documented what happened.

Most importantly, though,

her job was to come back after a week,

now without the dead crow,

so that we could see if the birds would
treat her just like any old pedestrian,

or if, instead, they would exhibit
behaviors like alarm calling

or dive bombing

that would indicate
that they perceived her as a predator.

Now, given that we already knew
crows were capable of learning

and recognizing human faces,

it may come as no surprise
that the majority of crows in our study

did treat the masks that they saw
handling dead crows as threats

when they saw them over the course
of the next six weeks.

Now, if you're sitting there thinking,

alright, give me a break,

look at that face, it is terrifying,

anyone would treat that as a threat

if they saw it walking down the street,

know that you are not alone.

As it turns out, a lot of the folks

whose houses we did
these experiments in front of

felt the same way,

but we'll save that for another time.

So you may be comforted to know
that we did control tests

to make sure that crows don't share
our preconceived bias against masks

that look a bit like
the female version of Hannibal Lecter.

Now, in addition to finding that crows
were able to make associations with people

based on their handling of dead crows,

we also found that in the days
following these funeral events,

as we continued to feed them,

that their willingness to come down
to the food pile significantly diminished,

and we didn't see that same kind
of decline in our control groups.

So that suggests that, yes,
crows can make associations

with particular places
where they've seen dead crows.

So together, what that tells us is that

while we certainly shouldn't discount
those other explanations,

we can feel pretty confident in saying

that for crows, attention to their dead

might be a really important way

that these animals learn about danger.

And that's a nice, tidy little narrative

on which to hang our hats.

But in life and death,

things are rarely so neat,

and I really came face to face with that
in a follow-up experiment,

where we were looking at
how crows respond to dead crows

in the absence of any kind of predator.

And suffice it to say,
we found that in these cases,

the wakes can get a little more weird.

So this is what that
experimental setup looks like.

You can see our stuffed dead crow
alone on the sidewalk,

and it's been placed
on the territory of a pair.

(Squawk)

That is the alarm call
by one of those territorial birds,

and it's coming into frame.

Pretty soon, its mate is going to join it.

And so far, this is all very usual.

This is what crows do.

OK, right now it's getting
a little less usual.

Not everyone here might be familiar
with what bird sex looks like,

so if you are not,
this is what it looks like.

You're basically seeing
a confluence of three behaviors:

alarm, as indicated by the alarm calling;

aggression, as indicated
by the very forceful pecking

by both one of the copulatory birds
and one of the excited bystanders;

and sexual arousal.

Clearly, this is startling,

and interesting to think about
and talk about.

But if our goal is to understand

the big picture of how animals
interact with their dead,

then the most important question
we should ask is, is this representative?

Is this something
that's happening consistently?

And that's why being able to do
systematic studies with crows

is so valuable,

because after conducting
hundreds of these trials,

where I was placing these dead crows
out on the sidewalks

on the territories
of hundreds of different pairs,

what we found was that, no, it's not.

Contact of any kind,

whether it was sexual, aggressive

or even just exploratory,

only occurred 30 percent of the time.

So given that this wasn't representative,

this was the minority,

we may be tempted to just dismiss it

as irrelevant, odd, creepy,
weird crow behavior.

But what may surprise you
is that behaviors like aggression

or even sexual arousal

aren't all that rare,

and certainly aren't
constrained to just crows.

Because while the popular narrative
when it comes to animal death behaviors

tends to focus on affiliative behaviors

like grooming or guarding,

that is far from the complete list
of what even our closest relatives do

around their dead.

In fact, we've documented behaviors
like biting, beating and even sex itself

in a wide variety of animals,

including many primates and dolphins.

So where does this leave us
in our understanding of animals

and their death rituals?

Well, for crows, it suggests that,

like insects, they may have
a strong adaptive driver

in their interest in their dead.

In this case, it might be danger learning,

and that might have acted
as the inspiration

for our own rituals as well.

But when we look more closely,

we see that there's
no one simple narrative

that can explain
the vast array of behaviors

we see in crows and many other animals.

And that suggests that we are still
far from completing that time machine.

But it's going to be
a really fascinating ride.

Thank you.

(Applause)