use of the “f-word,” as one commentator put it. Some critics smelled straight-out anthropomorphism. This was hardly a funeral in the human sense. No, but the researchers weren’t suggesting that. They were just demonstrating how birds respond to a dead member of their own species: apparently, by noisily telling other birds about the death and perhaps alerting the group to danger, a behavior the scientists called “cacophonous aggregation.” In this sense, perhaps the scrub jay gathering was more like the Irish wake that naturalist Laura Erickson recalled when she heard about this research.