Study
Wild American crows gather around their dead to learn about danger
Swift, Kaeli N.; Marzluff, John M.
Animal Behaviour, 2015
A masked volunteer stood holding a dead crow near feeding territories. Crows were later tested to see whether they avoided the food site and whether they scolded the mask, with control conditions using the mask alone and a dead pigeon.
- Studied in
- Corvus brachyrhynchos
- Sample size
- 65 territorial pairs of American crows
Crows mobbed the person holding a dead crow, avoided the food site afterwards, and continued to scold that mask for weeks. The effect was specific: a dead pigeon did not produce it in the same way.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Gathering around a dead crow is a danger-learning behaviour: the birds are acquiring information about a place and a person associated with a dead conspecific.
How NatureHQ reads it
This is the study behind the "crow funeral" idea, and it is worth being precise about what it found. The birds are learning, not mourning: the design measured avoidance and alarm, which are exactly what a danger-learning account predicts. It says nothing either way about whether crows experience anything resembling grief, because no part of the experiment could have detected that.
- Measures alarm and avoidance only — the design cannot address internal experience.
- Dead crows were presented by a human, which conflates the corpse with the person holding it.
- Restricted to one species in an urban setting.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Elsevier journalsPublished in an Elsevier journal.
doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2015.08.021
This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref and OpenAlex on 2026-08-11.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-09.