6 ms·

Birds hold 'funerals' for dead

89 points by zoowar 14y ago

Spooky23 14y ago
These sorts of stories are always fascinating to me. If you look back at human history, one of the big differentiators between human cultures is how we handle our dead. Was the origin of that behavior a sort of opportunity for groups of humans to learn from the death of their friends? Or are our emotions a sort of outgrowth of the behaviors these birds display?
mark_l_watson 14y ago
This sounds reasonable. When we lived by the beach there was a blue jay who after accepting food from me on our deck for about a year started one day landing on my legs when I was on a lounge chair to get more food. This behavior lasted for a few years until a cat got him. Now, years later, we have a domesticated Meyers Parrot and his behavior is very complex and interesting.
jerf 14y ago
There's some projection here. We see some birds gathering around a corpse, we know that if we did that we would be "mourning", but that does not mean that they are. Stopping eating for a day may sound like mourning, but it also sounds like a very sensible defense against poisoning. They may be; it is true that many birds exhibit complex behavior. But at least based on the info given in this article, there's a lot of unjustified assumptions about the internal states of the bird's brains based on deep, deep subconscious assumptions about how humans would be feeling if we saw humans acting that way. I would consider it just as likely that to the extent they are "feeling" something it would be something with no human analog.
- trout 14y ago
  I thought the exact opposite from the article. I decoupled the idea that a funeral was an emotional or cultural event with something that is a long time survival technique. We place a value in funerals from a cultural level, but forget that ultimately it's just a behavior that extends our survival. What better time to slow down and think about the lessons learned? Is culture not just distilled and sophisticated survival techniques? Is the difference for why birds 'mourn without feeling' and why we 'mourn with feeling' any different?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - eru 14y ago
    > Is culture not just distilled and sophisticated survival techniques? Not in the way you interpret the sentence. Cultures act like they were only interested in their own survival.
- Dove 14y ago
  That seems excessively skeptical to me. You don't know what an animal is feeling, in the sense that you don't know other minds exist, but I think when animal behavior makes emotional sense, it's appropriate to interpret it that way. Nor do I think it's that farfetched that birds should feel grief. A lot of animals display emotions that I identify with. I've seen pride and humiliation and saving face in cats. And dogs obviously feel joy and worry and mourning. I understand the need to distinguish between what's likely and what's proven, but I also don't see a reason for the explanation to be complex. It looks like grief. I think it's more likely to be that than some alien phenomenon that happens to look like it.
  - Scriptor 14y ago
    We don't know what those birds are feeling, but we have no reason to assume it's grief over other feelings. At face value, they are making alarm calls and gathering around the dead body. Of course we don't know how birds display grief and maybe this is how they show it, but again we have no evidence for that. Thinking that their actions may be done to warn of poisonous food sources isn't as far-fetched as you make it out to be. It has a clear evolutionary benefit. As for grief, it is beneficial in tight communities as it helps strengthen social bonds. This is why people are less affected by the death of a stranger than that of a close relative. But blue jays are not highly social animals and the dead bird in question is one they have never seen before anyway. Scientifically, grief is actually one of the less likely possibilities as there doesn't seem to be any reason why they would grieve an unknown bird. And does grief really make emotional sense? When a person finds a body on the street, what do they do? They call for help. Afterwards a crowd may gather as the police cordon off the area. But the crowd isn't grieving, they're simply morbidly curious.
  - jkbyc 14y ago
    > And dogs obviously feel joy and worry and mourning. It's not so obvious. Especially with domestic animals, the kind of behaviour you are describing may have evolved in order to survive in humans' company. Recommended reading: Daniel Dennett's Kinds of Minds ( http://www.amazon.com/Kinds-Of-Minds-Understanding-Consciousness/dp/0465073514 http://www.amazon.com/Kinds-Of-Minds-Understanding-Conscious... ) Wittgenstein on what a lion would say if he could speak: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=628eVJgHD6I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=628eVJgHD6I (This is a very pleasant pineapple)
- bfe 14y ago
  If they developed an adaptation to step eating for over a day by associating a dead bird with poisoned food or some other danger, wouldn't a more effective response be to leave for somewhere else? They stop eating for over a day while also calling each other over and gathering together around the dead body. Applying the term "funeral" is a really unscientific and poorly chosen description, but that is an interesting collection of behaviors. I get an eerie feeling sometimes watching Western scrub jays, gray jays, and Steller's jays and how complex their behavior can seem.
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > I get an eerie feeling sometimes watching Western scrub jays, gray jays, and Steller's jays and how complex their behavior can seem. All members of the family Corvidae (along with crows and ravens), and all quite intelligent -- so intelligent that the meant-to-be-critical phrase "bird-brain" seems too wide of the mark. I just discovered that Corvids pass the mirror test. I've always known them to be very smart, but this is a new twist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test
- Tichy 14y ago
  I think the article also didn't call it mourning, except perhaps in the headline. It explicitly mentions that the behavior helps survive threats. Also, what is human mourning good for? Perhaps we interpret too much into our own behavior, too.
- walterkim 14y ago
  On the flipside, we humans have spent centuries convincing ourselves that we are fundamentally different from animals and assuming that our experiences are unique to us. Social animals are much closer to us than we give them credit for, particularly with respect to emotions, given the evolutionary role they play in making kinds of sociality possible.
- jessedhillon 14y ago
  Anyone who issues this kind of criticism, as is inevitable when these animal stories come up on HN, needs to provide a consistent, objective framework explaining why I should not regard their perceived individuality (and accompanying emotional state) as merely the output of a very complex, deterministic state machine. I can think of no reasonable standard which would produce evidence for the theory that your own behavior is everything short of magical, but an animal's behavior is all mimicry, evolutionarily derived to be advantageous for survival, but not indicative of that magical personhood. What evidence should I take to be suffficient proof of the proposition that your emotions are real and the birds' aren't. A sensible defense against poisoning? Just because evolutionary psych seems intuitive doesn't mean that every seemingly inuitive speculation passes for evolutionary psych. Do you stop eating for a day when your friend has diarrhea from a meal 12 hours earlier? Didn't your highly social species also evolve in an environment where food poisoning was a concern? On a meta note, while I realize that it's science reporting, which is generally of bad quality -- why does every article on HN about some research findings receive at least one comment from someone at a keyboard who thinks he has a better explanation than people who spent months putting this work together. (Many of whom have committed their lives to this field) Do you like it when, e.g., a client dismisses hours of your work because it doesn't have the latest X which he only heard about last week, and really has no clue how it works or whether that would be applicable? Don't we all generally think that such a person is an assclown? How is this different? Or to put it another way, given a short sunmary of the story made for a public which reads at the eight grade level (at best) -- if a person could generate the criticism given that simple input, how/why would it be that the authors who invest their own careers in the research wouldn't have anticipated and addressed it?
  - mjn 14y ago
    > if a person could generate the criticism given that simple input, how/why would it be that the authors who invest their own careers in the research wouldn't have anticipated and addressed it? People who work in the field do also level the same criticism, quite frequently; teleological and anthropomorphizing explanations are extremely controversial topics in biology. The critique that some researchers jump to such explanations more quickly than the evidence warrants reappears frequently, and the critique that popular-science writers and journalists do so is basically universal. Most researchers also try to avoid doing so. You'll often find such explanations in scare quotes in papers, with it being clear that they're an evocative shorthand, not part of the scientific conclusions: the researchers really have a certain set of scientific conclusions about an observed phenomenon, which they refer to as a "funeral" as shorthand, but the scientific conclusions don't usually include any attempt to prove a strong analogy with human funerals. (It does somewhat depend on the journal how strictly such careful treatment of metaphors is enforced.) In this case, the BBC article is a lot more anthropomorphizing than the original article (linked at the bottom), which doesn't make any conclusions about mourning or similarity to human funeral practices.
georgemcbay 14y ago
For anyone that finds this interesting, I highly recommend "A Murder of Crows", which was made a few years ago and is where I first heard of the idea of birds holding funerals: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/a-murder-of-crows/full-episode/5977/ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/a-murder-of-crows/fu...
michaelbuckbee 14y ago
I'm reminded of the National Geographic story (and iconic photo) of the chimpanzees grieving over the death of one of their own. http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/10/the-story-behind-our-photo-of-grieving-chimps.html http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/10/the-story-behind-o...
autophil 14y ago
Lots of findings coming out lately about animals having empathy and demonstrating qualities us humans think we're unique for. And it makes me sad. We're not considerate towards animals. We hardly give them a second thought. We eat them, cage them and experiment on them. Humans need to be better "caretakers" of the planet. We need advances in compassion towards animals and the environment, not more advances in technology.
- philwelch 14y ago
  Another thing many of those animals have in common with us? They eat other animals. The cheetah uses its speed, the wolf uses its pack instinct, and we use our intellect to capture our respective prey. The environment is a dangerous, savage place.
  - Shum 14y ago
    I think we have a responsibility to hold ourselves to higher standards than that of a wolf or cheetah. Given our intellectual capacity to do so. Suffering is bad. The fact that it occurs in nature is irrelevant.
    - lutusp 14y ago
      > I think we have a responsibility to hold ourselves to higher standards than that of a wolf or cheetah. We may or may not have that responsibility, but we certainly don't meet it. History shows that people are at least as vicious as any animal you can name. This is something one tends to forget between wars, or in a place untouched by war. > Suffering is bad. The fact that it occurs in nature is irrelevant. The fact that it occurs everywhere in nature is absolutely relevant. Consider the rules of civilized society -- for example, everyone has the right to the pursuit of happiness. Some pursue happiness by having a lot of children, more than the planet can support. The result is widespread disease, starvation and war (otherwise known as "retroactive abortion"). It seems the high standards we've set for ourselves can result in (is resulting in) an unimaginable disaster, one in which everyone exercises their innate freedom of expression. But there is a solution -- education. The very thing governments fear the most.
sleepyhead 14y ago
I saw a monkey funeral in Malaysia last year. Took a really long time and a bunch of monkeys from around the area all walked towards a tree while some came up and patted the dead baby which the mother was holding. They ended up all sitting in a big tree. This was at a little hill which has some tourists coming to it and normally the monkeys would be up at the road eating food that the tourists give out. But while the funeral was going on almost all the monkeys took part of it.
mise 14y ago
I have often wondered: where do dying birds go to die? Except for roadkill, I don't see dead birds. I'm guessing under some shrubs, where they hide away weakly?

89 points by zoowar 14y ago

These sorts of stories are always fascinating to me. If you look back at human history, one of the big differentiators between human cultures is how we handle our dead. Was the origin of that behavior a sort of opportunity for groups of humans to learn from the death of their friends? Or are our emotions a sort of outgrowth of the behaviors these birds display?

mark_l_watson 14y ago

This sounds reasonable. When we lived by the beach there was a blue jay who after accepting food from me on our deck for about a year started one day landing on my legs when I was on a lounge chair to get more food. This behavior lasted for a few years until a cat got him. Now, years later, we have a domesticated Meyers Parrot and his behavior is very complex and interesting.

jerf 14y ago

There's some projection here. We see some birds gathering around a corpse, we know that if we did that we would be "mourning", but that does not mean that they are. Stopping eating for a day may sound like mourning, but it also sounds like a very sensible defense against poisoning. They may be; it is true that many birds exhibit complex behavior. But at least based on the info given in this article, there's a lot of unjustified assumptions about the internal states of the bird's brains based on deep, deep subconscious assumptions about how humans would be feeling if we saw humans acting that way. I would consider it just as likely that to the extent they are "feeling" something it would be something with no human analog.

trout 14y ago
I thought the exact opposite from the article. I decoupled the idea that a funeral was an emotional or cultural event with something that is a long time survival technique. We place a value in funerals from a cultural level, but forget that ultimately it's just a behavior that extends our survival. What better time to slow down and think about the lessons learned? Is culture not just distilled and sophisticated survival techniques? Is the difference for why birds 'mourn without feeling' and why we 'mourn with feeling' any different?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- eru 14y ago
  > Is culture not just distilled and sophisticated survival techniques? Not in the way you interpret the sentence. Cultures act like they were only interested in their own survival.
Dove 14y ago
That seems excessively skeptical to me. You don't know what an animal is feeling, in the sense that you don't know other minds exist, but I think when animal behavior makes emotional sense, it's appropriate to interpret it that way. Nor do I think it's that farfetched that birds should feel grief. A lot of animals display emotions that I identify with. I've seen pride and humiliation and saving face in cats. And dogs obviously feel joy and worry and mourning. I understand the need to distinguish between what's likely and what's proven, but I also don't see a reason for the explanation to be complex. It looks like grief. I think it's more likely to be that than some alien phenomenon that happens to look like it.
- Scriptor 14y ago
  We don't know what those birds are feeling, but we have no reason to assume it's grief over other feelings. At face value, they are making alarm calls and gathering around the dead body. Of course we don't know how birds display grief and maybe this is how they show it, but again we have no evidence for that. Thinking that their actions may be done to warn of poisonous food sources isn't as far-fetched as you make it out to be. It has a clear evolutionary benefit. As for grief, it is beneficial in tight communities as it helps strengthen social bonds. This is why people are less affected by the death of a stranger than that of a close relative. But blue jays are not highly social animals and the dead bird in question is one they have never seen before anyway. Scientifically, grief is actually one of the less likely possibilities as there doesn't seem to be any reason why they would grieve an unknown bird. And does grief really make emotional sense? When a person finds a body on the street, what do they do? They call for help. Afterwards a crowd may gather as the police cordon off the area. But the crowd isn't grieving, they're simply morbidly curious.
- jkbyc 14y ago
  > And dogs obviously feel joy and worry and mourning. It's not so obvious. Especially with domestic animals, the kind of behaviour you are describing may have evolved in order to survive in humans' company. Recommended reading: Daniel Dennett's Kinds of Minds ( http://www.amazon.com/Kinds-Of-Minds-Understanding-Consciousness/dp/0465073514 http://www.amazon.com/Kinds-Of-Minds-Understanding-Conscious... ) Wittgenstein on what a lion would say if he could speak: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=628eVJgHD6I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=628eVJgHD6I (This is a very pleasant pineapple)
bfe 14y ago
If they developed an adaptation to step eating for over a day by associating a dead bird with poisoned food or some other danger, wouldn't a more effective response be to leave for somewhere else? They stop eating for over a day while also calling each other over and gathering together around the dead body. Applying the term "funeral" is a really unscientific and poorly chosen description, but that is an interesting collection of behaviors. I get an eerie feeling sometimes watching Western scrub jays, gray jays, and Steller's jays and how complex their behavior can seem.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > I get an eerie feeling sometimes watching Western scrub jays, gray jays, and Steller's jays and how complex their behavior can seem. All members of the family Corvidae (along with crows and ravens), and all quite intelligent -- so intelligent that the meant-to-be-critical phrase "bird-brain" seems too wide of the mark. I just discovered that Corvids pass the mirror test. I've always known them to be very smart, but this is a new twist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test
Tichy 14y ago
I think the article also didn't call it mourning, except perhaps in the headline. It explicitly mentions that the behavior helps survive threats. Also, what is human mourning good for? Perhaps we interpret too much into our own behavior, too.
walterkim 14y ago
On the flipside, we humans have spent centuries convincing ourselves that we are fundamentally different from animals and assuming that our experiences are unique to us. Social animals are much closer to us than we give them credit for, particularly with respect to emotions, given the evolutionary role they play in making kinds of sociality possible.
jessedhillon 14y ago
Anyone who issues this kind of criticism, as is inevitable when these animal stories come up on HN, needs to provide a consistent, objective framework explaining why I should not regard their perceived individuality (and accompanying emotional state) as merely the output of a very complex, deterministic state machine. I can think of no reasonable standard which would produce evidence for the theory that your own behavior is everything short of magical, but an animal's behavior is all mimicry, evolutionarily derived to be advantageous for survival, but not indicative of that magical personhood. What evidence should I take to be suffficient proof of the proposition that your emotions are real and the birds' aren't. A sensible defense against poisoning? Just because evolutionary psych seems intuitive doesn't mean that every seemingly inuitive speculation passes for evolutionary psych. Do you stop eating for a day when your friend has diarrhea from a meal 12 hours earlier? Didn't your highly social species also evolve in an environment where food poisoning was a concern? On a meta note, while I realize that it's science reporting, which is generally of bad quality -- why does every article on HN about some research findings receive at least one comment from someone at a keyboard who thinks he has a better explanation than people who spent months putting this work together. (Many of whom have committed their lives to this field) Do you like it when, e.g., a client dismisses hours of your work because it doesn't have the latest X which he only heard about last week, and really has no clue how it works or whether that would be applicable? Don't we all generally think that such a person is an assclown? How is this different? Or to put it another way, given a short sunmary of the story made for a public which reads at the eight grade level (at best) -- if a person could generate the criticism given that simple input, how/why would it be that the authors who invest their own careers in the research wouldn't have anticipated and addressed it?
- mjn 14y ago
  > if a person could generate the criticism given that simple input, how/why would it be that the authors who invest their own careers in the research wouldn't have anticipated and addressed it? People who work in the field do also level the same criticism, quite frequently; teleological and anthropomorphizing explanations are extremely controversial topics in biology. The critique that some researchers jump to such explanations more quickly than the evidence warrants reappears frequently, and the critique that popular-science writers and journalists do so is basically universal. Most researchers also try to avoid doing so. You'll often find such explanations in scare quotes in papers, with it being clear that they're an evocative shorthand, not part of the scientific conclusions: the researchers really have a certain set of scientific conclusions about an observed phenomenon, which they refer to as a "funeral" as shorthand, but the scientific conclusions don't usually include any attempt to prove a strong analogy with human funerals. (It does somewhat depend on the journal how strictly such careful treatment of metaphors is enforced.) In this case, the BBC article is a lot more anthropomorphizing than the original article (linked at the bottom), which doesn't make any conclusions about mourning or similarity to human funeral practices.

georgemcbay 14y ago

For anyone that finds this interesting, I highly recommend "A Murder of Crows", which was made a few years ago and is where I first heard of the idea of birds holding funerals: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/a-murder-of-crows/full-episode/5977/ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/a-murder-of-crows/fu...

michaelbuckbee 14y ago

I'm reminded of the National Geographic story (and iconic photo) of the chimpanzees grieving over the death of one of their own. http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/10/the-story-behind-our-photo-of-grieving-chimps.html http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/10/the-story-behind-o...

autophil 14y ago

Lots of findings coming out lately about animals having empathy and demonstrating qualities us humans think we're unique for. And it makes me sad. We're not considerate towards animals. We hardly give them a second thought. We eat them, cage them and experiment on them. Humans need to be better "caretakers" of the planet. We need advances in compassion towards animals and the environment, not more advances in technology.

philwelch 14y ago
Another thing many of those animals have in common with us? They eat other animals. The cheetah uses its speed, the wolf uses its pack instinct, and we use our intellect to capture our respective prey. The environment is a dangerous, savage place.
- Shum 14y ago
  I think we have a responsibility to hold ourselves to higher standards than that of a wolf or cheetah. Given our intellectual capacity to do so. Suffering is bad. The fact that it occurs in nature is irrelevant.
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > I think we have a responsibility to hold ourselves to higher standards than that of a wolf or cheetah. We may or may not have that responsibility, but we certainly don't meet it. History shows that people are at least as vicious as any animal you can name. This is something one tends to forget between wars, or in a place untouched by war. > Suffering is bad. The fact that it occurs in nature is irrelevant. The fact that it occurs everywhere in nature is absolutely relevant. Consider the rules of civilized society -- for example, everyone has the right to the pursuit of happiness. Some pursue happiness by having a lot of children, more than the planet can support. The result is widespread disease, starvation and war (otherwise known as "retroactive abortion"). It seems the high standards we've set for ourselves can result in (is resulting in) an unimaginable disaster, one in which everyone exercises their innate freedom of expression. But there is a solution -- education. The very thing governments fear the most.

sleepyhead 14y ago

I saw a monkey funeral in Malaysia last year. Took a really long time and a bunch of monkeys from around the area all walked towards a tree while some came up and patted the dead baby which the mother was holding. They ended up all sitting in a big tree. This was at a little hill which has some tourists coming to it and normally the monkeys would be up at the road eating food that the tourists give out. But while the funeral was going on almost all the monkeys took part of it.

mise 14y ago

I have often wondered: where do dying birds go to die? Except for roadkill, I don't see dead birds. I'm guessing under some shrubs, where they hide away weakly?