Do Crows Hold Funerals? What Scientists Have Found

What happens at a crow “funeral”?

When a crow finds a dead crow, it typically gives loud alarm calls. Within minutes, other crows arrive, sometimes dozens of them, perching in nearby trees and on wires and calling harshly. Some fly down for a closer look, and a few may dive at people or animals nearby. After a while the group disperses.

Observers have described these scenes for a long time, and they inspired stories of crows holding wakes or funerals. Similar “cacophonous aggregations” have been recorded in other members of the crow family, including western scrub-jays, magpies and ravens.

The 2015 University of Washington study

To find out what crows were really doing, biologist Kaeli Swift and John Marzluff ran a series of experiments with wild American crows in neighborhoods around Seattle, published in 2015. They first trained local crows to visit a spot where food was put out regularly. Then a volunteer stood near the food holding a preserved, taxidermied crow so that it looked dead.

Crows responded strongly. They gave alarm calls, gathered in groups, and many mobbed the volunteer. When the researchers showed a dead pigeon instead, the crows paid little attention. Crows also reacted strongly to a model red-tailed hawk, a real predator of crows, which helped the researchers compare a known danger with a dead crow.

What the crows learned

The key result came afterward. When the dead crow was shown, the birds were slower to come back to the food, and many avoided the site for a day or more, even though food was still put out. When volunteers who had held a dead crow later returned without it, crows scolded them, as if they now linked that person with danger.

The researchers concluded that the gatherings help crows learn about threats: which places, predators and people are associated with death. This fits what is known about crow memory, including their ability to recognize and remember dangerous people for years; see Do crows remember faces?

Why would learning from the dead help crows?

For a wild animal, finding out about a danger by experiencing it can be fatal. A dead crow is a safer source of information: it shows that a threat exists without any living crow having to be attacked. Calling others to the scene spreads that lesson quickly through families and neighbors.

This matters especially for crows because they live in changing places, such as farms, suburbs and cities, where new dangers keep appearing, from cars and cats to people with nets or guns. A species that can learn about such threats secondhand has a clear survival advantage.

Do crows touch their dead?

In a later study, Swift and Marzluff recorded what crows did when they came close to a dead crow. In most cases the birds only watched and called. A minority pecked or pulled at the body, and in a few cases crows even attempted to mate with it, which shows that the behavior is not a simple, consistent “funeral” ritual. The reasons for this touching are still unclear.

Do crows grieve?

Scientists are careful here. Grief is an emotion, and emotions are very hard to measure in animals that cannot tell us what they feel. The crow experiments show that the gatherings have a practical purpose, but they do not prove that crows feel nothing. Crows live in close family groups for years, and losing a family member may well affect them in ways that are not yet understood.

What the evidence does not support is the idea of a deliberate ceremony, such as crows bringing gifts or burying the dead. Those stories come from folklore and anecdotes, not from observation.

How other animals respond to their dead

The study of how animals react to death is called comparative thanatology, and it has produced some striking observations:

• Elephants often stop to sniff and touch the bones and tusks of dead elephants, and family members may stay near a dying relative for hours.
• Chimpanzees have been seen grooming and staying close to dying group members, and some chimpanzee mothers carry a dead infant for days or even weeks.
• Orcas and dolphins sometimes push or carry a dead calf. In 2018, a Pacific Northwest orca known as J35, or Tahlequah, carried her dead calf for 17 days.
• Western scrub-jays call loudly and gather around a dead jay, then stop feeding in the area for a while, much like crows.

As with crows, scientists debate how much of this reflects grief and how much reflects curiosity, social bonds or learning about danger.

Why it matters

Crow funerals show how much information a dead animal can carry for a social, intelligent species. By reacting to their dead, crows can learn about new dangers without having to face them directly, a skill that helps them thrive alongside people in cities and towns. For more on corvid minds, see How smart are crows and ravens?