The secret life of urban crows

Crows are incredibly clever birds, capable of using tools and recognizing faces. Researchers have even found that crows mourn their dead and hold 'funerals.'

Urban crows.
(Image credit: RBflora / Alamy Stock Photo)

On a blustery overcast morning this past April, Kaeli Swift walked across the campus of the University of Washington toting a weathered purple-and-white plastic shopping bag. This bag, if found by some unsuspecting student or groundskeeper, would almost certainly trigger a campuswide panic. Inside, Swift had stowed a rubber mask of a grotesque, exaggerated male face — large ears, bulbous nose, silver-whiskered soul patch — a guise that would not look out of place in a 1980s horror film. Also inside: a corpse. That the corpse was only that of a bird didn't make the tattered bag's combined payload any less creepy.

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. 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.

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