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"I once happened upon what seemed to be a magpie funeral service. A magpie had been hit by a car. Four of his flock mates stood around him silently and pecked gently at his body. One, then another, flew off and brought back pine needles and twigs and laid them by his body. They all stood vigil for a time, nodded their heads, and flew off."
"I also watched a red fox bury her mate after a cougar had killed him. She gently laid dirt and twigs over his body, stopped, looked to make sure he was all covered, patted down the dirt and twigs with her forepaws, stood silently for a moment, then trotted off, tail down and ears laid back against her head. After publishing my stories I got emails from people all over the world who had seen similar behavior in various birds and mammals."
I wrote these words in an essay I published in Yes! Magazine and I've written many essays about grief and funeral rituals in nonhuman animals (animals; see also).
Here's a story I received in response to my observations of the magpie funeral.
"I have a farm in Bolton, UK and we were overrun with Magpies. The reaction from the magpies [to the corpse of another magpie] in the vicinity was akin to a scene from the film 'The Birds', as they surrounded the lifeless bird and tried to reawaken it with their beaks. When they reached the conclusion that it was indeed dead, there was an outpouring of loud cackling noises which reached quite a crescendo (there were around 20 of them); this was echoed by a similar sympathetic chorus from a nearby wood and within a minute, from all surrounding areas giving the impression that hundreds of magpies were being told of the death and simultaneously expressing their grief. It was quite unnerving and I remained within the safe confines of a barn until all was over."
Are squawking jays really holding a funeral service?
There's a lot of interest in grief in animals and yesterday I learned about a research paper published in the prestigious journal Animal Behaviour titled "Western scrub-jay funerals: cacophonous aggregations in response to dead conspecifics" by Teresa Inglesias and her colleagues at the University of California in Davis. The abstract and some other information about this paper can be found here. The last sentence of the abstract reads, "Our results show that without witnessing the struggle and manner of death, the sight of a dead conspecific is used as public information and that this information is actively shared with conspecifics and used to reduce exposure to risk." It's interesting that the response to a dead jay was the same as that observed in response to a model of a predator, in this case a stuffed great horned owl. (Conspecifics are members of the same species.)
What caught my eye about this essay is the use of the word "funeral" in the title. Most professional journals would never allow the use of this supposedly "anthropomorphic" word and those that might wouldn't unless it was bracketed in scare quotes as "funerals". My colleague Barbara King, author of the forthcoming book How Animals Grieve, has also written about this study in an essay called "Do birds hold funerals?" and notes that the word "funeral" - what King calls the f-word - only appears in the title and not in the text. Taking her lead to do a word search I discovered that the words "grief" and "grieving" don't appear in the text although one would have expected them to if the paper really has much to say about funerals. In her essay Dr. King presents some exchanges she had with the senior author about the use of the word "funeral" in the title but not in the text.
While I was talking about the research article with Jessica Pierce, who also writes for Psychology Today and has dealt in depth with these topics in some of her essays and in her new book titled The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the End of Their Lives, we discussed how grieving is an individual behavior and that it might be that the funeral rituals that involve signals that cause other animals to vocalize, for example, are an example of what ethologists called social contagion. In this way the vocalizations not only warn others of possible danger but also serve to attract animals to the site of the corpse to reinforce social bonds among survivors, sort of like saying "Everything will be okay", as has been suggested for funeral rituals in other animals including humans.
It's highly likely that other animals exchange a lot of different sorts of information about dead conspecifics using not only sounds but also visual cues and odors. It's entirely possible that the cacophonous alarm calling is part of a funeral ritual sort of like a rowdy wake that precedes a human funeral.
Whether or not jays hold funerals as do other animals is a very important question that needs further study and this detailed research paper is a very important beginning into more systematic studies of animal funerals and animal grief, topics that are also covered in Psychology Today writers John Marzluff and Tony Angell's book Gifts of the Crow (see also).
The ways in which animals respond to the death of another individual make for an alluring area of research. I'm personally thrilled to see professional journals loosen up and allow words like "funeral" to be used in the title of a peer-reviewed research paper because there's no doubt that many other animals hold funeral services, perhaps wakes, and grieve the loss of family and friends. We're not alone in the arena of grief so stand by for more on this fascinating topic
The teaser image can be found here.
