Why Scrub Jays have Funerals but don’t Grieve
Teresa Iglesias began her first year of graduate school at U.C. Davis while living on an almond farm. One afternoon, she heard some scrub jays cawing loudly from a tree lined clearing. Worried her cats — or the other farm cats — might be upsetting the birds, Iglesias went outside to investigate. There were plenty of feathers on the ground. But no body.
“My mind raced with questions,” said Iglesias. Did the jays see what happened? Were the birds are yelling at the predator? If the predator was gone, why are the birds still here? Isn’t it dangerous for them to stay in a loud group where a predator might be roaming? Did they know the bird who was killed? Could they be grieving?
Rushing back inside, Iglesias pulled out her computer to do a quick search on birds reacting to dead kin. The term “magpie funerals” came up in a short paragraph describing a group of black-billed magpies silently surrounding a dead flock member before departing. A little more searching lead Iglesias to a story about jackdaws — a grey-headed crow which likes to nest in tall buildings and chimneys — mobbing American zoologist and ornithologist Konrad Lorenz. Lorenz suggested the jackdaws mistook his black swim trunks for a dead jackdaw. Similarly, there are records of crows and ravens sounding alarm calls when confronted with their deceased kin.
Crows ravens, jackdaws, jays and magpies are members of the Corvidae family. For their size, they are incredibly smart animals; their brain to body ratio is the largest of all birds and is only slightly smaller than that of humans. Several members of the family have demonstrated self-awareness — a trait thought only to be possessed by humans and select few mammals — and tool making. Crows especially have a knack for using their environment to their advantage. You can often see crows dropping walnuts on the street with the hopes that they will be crushed by cars, allowing the birds to eat the nutty insides.
With this kind of exhibited intelligence, it’s not too big of a leap to think that they can make a distinction between the living and the dead. The bigger question is, do they have an emotional response to death? Do they grieve?
Most of the accounts Iglesias found were anecdotal with no systematic study behind the animal’s behavior. “I was intrigued and decided I would try to do a scientific study of this behavior in western scrub jays for my PhD,” said Iglesias. “In great part, it was an attempt to selfishly satisfy my own curiosity.” And, over the course of 3 years with the help of 45 undergraduate assistants and many leads to the locations of roadkill birds, she succeeded.
The researchers concluded that when confronted with the remains of another scrub jay or scrub jay like bird, they will mob the area and sound alarm calls. Interestingly, the scrub jays were less likely to react to feathers from smaller birds than feathers from scrub jay sized birds not from the area.
Unfortunately, the study did not investigate why scrub jays participate in this type of behavior. Some potential benefits of this behavior are that they might be able to drive away potential predators or warn their mates and offspring of the danger. This behavior is not without its risks; if the bird was killed by disease, the flock might also become infected and spread the disease further.
Of all the possible reasons for scrub jays to respond like this, the paper only briefly considers the possibility of the birds congregating to be for social reasons. And, despite the paper being titled “Western scrub-jay funerals”, the word funeral is only used in the title; the word grief is never used.
Soundscape expert Bernie Krause remarks during a TED Talk that animals experiencing emotions is a very controversial topic among biologists. It is incredibly human of us to assume we are the only creatures to feel grief. To feel joy. To feel love and hope and sadness. Animals may grieve differently than each other — if they grieve at all.
In her book How Animals Grieve, Barbra King explains that, “it’s no use trying to predict how an individual will react to losing a relative or some other person who has played a role in her life. People may not grieve when someone close to them dies. Or they may grieve in an interior way, invisible to others, or only when alone.” People are not even guaranteed to react the same way to something as banal as a movie or a painting; where one person sees blue, another sees green. Where one person sees tension and suspense, another sees excitement and adventure. We assume to know what other people feel, much less how other species feel. Even if animals feel, we have no way to confirm they feel like we do.
Admittedly, you can never know for sure that the person sitting next to you on the bus feels anything at all. You simply look at their face, note that they are human, and assume they feel like you do. Maybe it’s because they look like you, like your parents, like your friends — people whom you have talked with about your feelings and their feelings. The only reason you think other people feel is because that is what they have told you. An animal can’t tell you how it feels. All we have for proof is data and experience.
We expect animals like chimpanzees and elephants to feel grief — in them we see human traits like kindness and affection. They have hands (or trunks) and wield tools like we do. The more we study them the more connected we feel to them. Scientists like Jane Goodall and Cynthia Moss studied and lived beside these animals, and when we empathize with them, we empathize with the animals they came to love.
In her book Elephant Memories, Moss describes how her team brought the jaw of the elephant matriarch named Big Tuskless back to camp to determine her age at death. Several days later, Big Tuskless’ family passed by the camp. They smelled the matriarch and diverted their course to investigate. Despite the dozens of elephant jaws around the camp, the family ignored all but the Big Tuskless’ jaw. They each spent time touching it. Soon, they all moved on except for her seven-year-old son, Butch, who continued to roll the jaw around. Moss was convinced he recognized the jaw as belonging to his mother.
Similarly, in her book In the Shadow of Man, Jane Goodall describes the connection between a female chimpanzee named Flo and her son Flint. Flo was the mother of five: Faben, Figan, Fifi, Flint, and Flame. Though she was affectionate and caring with her first three children, she was too old to manage Flint’s constant need for attention. Flo soon gave birth to Flame despite not having weaned Flint. Flame died when she was six months old. Flo stopped trying to make Flint more independent, causing him to become “abnormally dependent on his mother,” according to Goodall. When Flo died, Flint didn’t know how to cope. He stopped eating, interacting with other chimpanzees, and showed signs of clinical depression. His immune system weakened, and he died at eight and a half years old, one month after his mother died.
Krause, in the same TED talk, describes how a colleague of his witnessed a game warden drop a stick of dynamite into a beaver dam, killing the female and her young. The colleague stayed behind to collect himself and gather whatever data he could for the rest of the afternoon. That evening, he watched as the solitary male beaver swam in circles crying out mournfully to his unresponsive mate and offspring. “This is probably the saddest sound I’ve ever heard coming from any organism, human or other,” says Krause.
As moving and sad as many of these accounts are, they are just that — accounts. And data is not anecdotal. Few are as systematic as Iglesias’ study with scrub jays. And, few of these accounts deal with non-mammalian species or species we deem less intelligent or even animals we commonly eat. It’s almost as though we presuppose that as animals appear less human, they become less capable of experiencing emotion. We would probably be more surprised to learn that fish can fall in love than if we learned rabbits can become depressed.
Most of the research done on animal cognition is on the connection between humans and animals, not on the connection between animals themselves. So, why haven’t we studied this connection? Could it be because it is unethical? Or is it simply because scientists are uninterested in the answer? What would we do if we knew the answer? What a profound effect it would have on humankind's view and treatment of animals if we knew they had could grieve. Maybe, on a subconscious level, we simply don’t want to know. Maybe we realize we wouldn’t like the answer if we found one.
