This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Jason Goldman.

Crows react really strongly to one of their own being dead, including gathering around their deceased comrades.

Some experts believe that these so-called crow funerals are efforts to learn, perhaps so they can avoid the same fate.

University of Washington researcher Kaye Swift is one of those Crow experts.

When a film crew came to her campus to record these behaviors,

Swift and her colleagues placed a dead crow on the grass. And they waited for the crows to show up and

investigate, just as they had done hundreds of previous times.

The first bird, you know, came in like like they do, and I'm sort of bracing myself for what has become, you know, what I'm expecting to be the typical response, which is that

it lights in a tree and alarm calls and then other birds come in. But instead what it does is it

it flies down to the ground and it kind of walks up to the

crow and but then it goes into really typical crow precopulatory posturing where basically they kind of drop their

wings down and they stick their tails up and they strut and it just struts on

over to the dead crow and jumps on top and copulates with it.

Neither Swift nor her advisor had ever heard of this behavior.

So they decided to determine just how common it is by conducting a series of experiments with

wild crows in Seattle.

They saw that most crows don't touch their dead.

They observed physical contact roughly a quarter of the time and

sexual contact occurred less than 5% of the time. The finding is in the journal

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

There's a twist that may be instructive.

...