Some Crows Engage In Necrophilia, New UW Research Shows

SEATTLE, WA - This puts the "crow" in "necrophilia," according to University of Washington PhD candidate Kaeli Swift. She recently published a study examining the different, sometimes disturbing, ways crows interact with their dead.

Swift has been studying crows for years. In 2015 that she witnessed something unusual. While helping with a documentary about Seattle girl's gift-exchanging relationship with crows, she watched as a living crow approached a dead crow and began to have sex with the corpse.

"No, no, this can’t be, I think. But then it happens. A quick hop, and the live crow mounts our dead one, thrashing in that unmistakable manner," she wrote on her blog about the encounter.

On Monday, the journal Philosophical Transactions B published her exhaustive study of how and when crows engage in such behavior, which can include necrophilia or postmortem abuse. Swift observed how 309 pairs of mating crows in Seattle reacted to different stimuli, including dead crows, dead squirrels, and dead pigeons - the later two which are sources of food for crows.

The good news: it's "atypical" for crows to interact with dead crows. Only about a quarter of crows did so, and only 4 percent of them tried to mate with the dead crow. And those interactions typically took place during the breeding season.

"Because this behavior is risky, this seems to back up previous studies in crows that suggest that they are primarily interested in dead crows as a way of self preservation and avoiding danger," Swift wrote in her blog.

Still, Swift observed some disturbing crow behavior - probably even more strange for the Seattle residents who watched her conduct the research.

"In the most dramatic examples, a crow would approach the dead crow while alarm calling, copulate with it, be joined in the sexual frenzy by its presumed mate, and then rip it into absolute shreds," she wrote. " I must have gone through a dozen dead crows over the course of the study, with some specimens only lasting through a single trial."

Photo by Neal McNamara/Patch