When crows encounter dead crows, sometimes, they make alarm calls or gather other birds to the scene, holding a “funeral” for the dead. Other times, they have sex with the corpse. Kaeli Swift, a PhD. candidate at the University of Washington discovered crow necrophilia by accident, and decided to study why.

According to The Atlantic, Swift got dozens of crow bodies from Seattle’s natural history museum, and recruited a friend to taxidermy the birds. She drove around Seattle, waiting for crows to leave their nests before placing a dead bird on the sidewalk to test reactions of hundreds of crows to corpses of their kin.

Most frequently, birds made alarm calls from a distance, or dive-bombed the bodies, treating them as danger signs. But 24 percent of birds would peck, pull, tough or drag the corpses, and four percent of the encounters went full on necrophilia. “In the most dramatic examples, a crow would approach the dead crow while alarm calling, copulate with it, be joined in the sexual frenzy by its presumed mate, and then rip it into absolute shreds,” Swift told The Atlantic.

The crows weren’t trying to scavenge or cannibalize the remains, and they weren’t mistaking the corpses for the living. Some crows mounted dead birds even with living mates nearby, which meant that it wasn’t out of sexual desperation either. So why did the crows try to mount the dead?

Swift speculates that a minority of crows lose their minds during the breeding season. When they see a dead crow, which has characteristics of food, an intruder, or a mate, they react to it as if it were all three. “It’s the result of them not quite processing all this information correctly and just responding with everything,” Swift says. Swift's research into crow behavior is the first experimental study on necrophilia in wild animals, but other species, including bottlenose dolphins, humpback whales, ground squirrels, toads and lizards also occasionally mate with the dead, with just as many animals that seem to grieve for their dead. “These cases help us develop a deeper experience of the natural world, and that’s never a bad thing,” Swift said.

(via The Atlantic)

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Laura Yan

Laura Yan is a writer in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in Wired, GQ, The Cut, Pacific Standard, Longreads, The Outline, and elsewhere.