![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Given enough time the throng will mob any predator it thinks is responsible, like say, a human in a Dick Cheney mask, or in a mask like the one Swift had in her bag (the lab affectionately refers to that be-soul-patched fellow as Joe).īecause she had decided to leave Joe out of today’s repeat of her groundbreaking experiment, she had to take precautions. The gist: Upon spotting one of its dead, the flock attends to the fallen bird en masse with loud shrieking. This, according to Swift, is what its like to attend a crow funeral-an instinctive ritual that evolved generations ago and was just discovered by humans Swift coauthored an article on her findings in the journal Animal Behaviour in 2015. And she conducted it with the ceremony of an undertaker. Today Swift, 30, would repeat an experiment that uncovered one of the team’s more staggering revelations. That led to another revelation: Crows teach other crows to detest specific people (and sometimes attack them). In 2008, Marzluff and his fellow researchers made national headlines when they tested a hypothesis-that crows recognize individual human faces-by donning Dick Cheney masks. The UW professor and wildlife biologist is the author of numerous popular books on the subject. If you’ve heard or read a news story in the last decade about Corvus brachyrhynchos-aka, the American crow-and what science has to say about its confounding habits and aptitude, there’s a good chance it was thanks to the work conducted by the lab, led by a man named John Marzluff. Swift, a PhD candidate, is a member of UW’s nationally acclaimed Avian Conservation Lab. Near the Dumpsters and trash cans parked behind the center, Swift found a perfect spot for what she was about to do: perform a ritual that, depending how you look at it, is a couple of years old or a couple million. She tromped through the wet grass in calf-high Sorel snow boots and made her way to the university’s Center for Urban Horticulture, where she’s a teaching assistant for an undergraduate natural history class. ![]()
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