The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

this “funeral” was different. It was created by Teresa Iglesias and her colleagues at the University of California, Davis, who were interested in how scrub jays might respond to the presence of a fellow jay already dead. The team set out a dead jay in a spot in a residential neighborhood where the jays normally forage and recorded what happened next. The first jay to encounter the dead bird responded by calling in other jays with a bloodcurdling alarm call. The jays nearby stopped foraging and flew to the site, joining in a loud, cacophonous gathering, which got bigger and noisier over time. Were they mourning a fallen member of the jay tribe? Jeering in outrage? Trading ideas about what killed him or how to get him out of this place? The birds congregated around the body for half an hour before they flew away; for a day or two thereafter, they avoided feeding in the area. Reactions to the study quickly cycled from wonder (birds mourning!) to a heated debate and criticism of the researchers’ inappropriate 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 j...