At a crossroads, I watched a crow had been hit by a car, laid to rest there on one side of the street. Crows descended from the trees, probably a hundred crows. In groups of maybe eight, ten, twelve, they would walk around that individual that was on the ground. And then they would fly off, and over a fifteen, twenty-minute period, eventually all the crows flew off, leaving that corpse of the crow in the road. Tony Angell, Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like HumansCrows have been yelling at me a lot lately. I'd like to tell you that I can understand what they've been saying, but I don't know. In my experience, it generally means that something is going to happen. Sometimes good, sometimes not good, but more than daily life. If he is feeling generous, Crow may show up in my dreams to elaborate. But he has been silent on the matter, leaving the tiny cousins to chide me. Or praise me? Who knows. I've never had a terribly strong connection with the goddesses, ancestors and spirits. My logical brain is quick to tell me that I am just telling myself what I want to hear, so I try to rely on omens, portents, dreams and divination. Sometimes that gives me a clear path, most of the time it doesn't. Sometimes when it's particularly murky, I do as my friend JohnM, the psych guy, suggests and I assign reasons and explanation as it's as good of an answer as any. A very Roman approach to things, but sometimes better than nothing.
There's debate about whether funeral is the right word to use because scientists aren't sure that there's a mourning component to the funerals or if it's essentially a study group:
'The funeral behaviour of crows is so widely observed, and people often asked about it - but we haven't known what was happening,' Kaeli Swift at the University of Washington, who led the research, told Dailymail.com.
The study recorded the crow's behaviour when stuffed crows which appeared dead were introduced to areas where they are feeding.
'I introduced one of my three dangerous scenarios: a masked person holding a dead crow, a masked person standing near perched hawk, and a masked person standing near a perched hawk with a dead crow.'
In all these cases the birds were taxidermy-prepared mounts.
'The masks were used to work out how the crows recognised people - I had different volunteers each week,' Swift said.
In 96% of cases , the response was the same.
'The discovering bird (usually the territory holder) would scold and typically attract 5-11 additional birds.
'The mob would stick around for 10-20 minutes, scolding loudly and gradually growing more silent and dispersing before all but the territory holders were left.'
Exposure to the dangerous stimuli would only last 30min, after which they were removed. - Mark Prigg
It made me think about human funeral rites, how when someone dies and there's conversation about the deceased, part of the conversation is almost inevitably about the whys of the death and then often how to distance ourselves from that why. But do we try to learn from it? Do we schedule more doctors appointments, take up running, quit smoking? Sometimes for a time, sometimes permanently. What do crows do when there is no answer? Is it a hole in their tiny hearts that remains there because they could not find the predator?
Because . . .sometimes there is no answer. When Devon died, we had no answer. He was found under his Mustang, which he was very proud of. Was it murder? Was it a suicide? Was it just some kind of freak accident? I still don't know. Neither does my sister. He was her boyfriend once, the first of three of her exboyfriends to die before she even turned 35. Before any of them turned 35. My mother and I were so messed up, just seeing him quiet in his coffin, so young. My sister had just started talking to him again, they would drink beer and laugh at the bar, happy to be hanging out together. What do you even say to someone in this day and age who has more in common with a Victorian widow than a young mom? If you look at her long enough, you see it in her, under her skin, whispering words to her heart that only she can hear. How does my cousin Mikey get up every day? He lost his brother who was only 32 and then his mother the next year to a car accident. How do they both keep leading normal lives? How do they learn to carry this heaviness? How do they laugh at stupid jokes, go to the grocery store, go to Starbucks? In some ways, the Victorian era made more sense, the mourning customs were oppressive, especially if you hated whoever had died, but you weren't expected to ever be okay again. If you were a shattered shell from grief, you were allowed to stay in that state as long as you needed to, even if it was for the rest of your life.
Why do we expect people to be okay again?