Ologies with Alie Ward - Corvid Thanatology (CROW FUNERALS) Encore with Kaeli Swift

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Crows have funerals? CROWS HAVE FUNERALS. The inky black bird with the big brain warns and maybe mourns around their fallen friends and Dr. Kaeli Swift is here to tell us all about it. As an avid wildlife researcher and corvid specialist, she's observed death behaviors that will shock you to your bones and ruffle your hackles -- while somehow also making you cry about peanuts. Also: so much inspiration to keep being yourself and to work hard toward what you love. She is a hero. Dr. Kaeli Swift's Blog, YouTube, Twitter & InstagramBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter or InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter or InstagramMore links at www.alieward.comSound editing by Steven Ray Morris 

Oh hey hello hi from the ghost of three years future from 2021 I'm here with an encore of one of the fattiest favorites episodes ever. Corvid Thanatology. Why? Because it's spooky but it's not at all too scary and also I'm in a hotel in Fremont and early tomorrow morning your pod mom Jared is going under the knife for knee surgery. A lot's going on. So here's Corvid Thanatology you're gonna love it. Listen to it again send it to someone you love or to someone you barely know. Okay. Oh hey. It's that old guy sitting on a shabby sheet couch in anthropology waiting for his daughter to try on pants that cost too much.

Alleyward. Back for another episode of allergies. A spooky episode of allergies. A scary episode. Okay fine. But does it get gother than the inky blue sheen of a crow in the shadows? Who also happens to be having a funeral for another crow? Nothing is more goth than that. Nothing. Not even a spider listening to Bauhaus on vinyl. A bat smoking a clove at a warehouse party is not as goth as a crow funeral and I've been sitting on this episode since July. I've been waiting to air it this week. I've been just building with nausea. I'm so excited to talk about Corvid Thanatology. Frickin' crow funerals. But first I will

talk quickly as I tell you things that also matter. Okay thank you to patrons at patreon.com slash allergies. Thanks to everyone for buying cool stuff at allergiesmerch.com and thanks for subscribing to and rating the podcast especially for reviewing it which helps get it seen by other people in each week to prove that your reviews mean so much. I read you a fresh one and this week I creeped on Sirius Beatles who wrote I have been experiencing an odd twilight zone effect or shortly after listening to one of your shows a moment in my life was so much richer from a thing I learned there. For just one

example snails. I'm at a tiny pack of wet sidewalk snails as I crouched intensely over their little googly eyes. I was overcome by an appreciation of their love darts, tiny hermaphroditic bodies, beauty products from their M word and French immigrant past. So much I cried. Sirius Beatles that rules thank you for letting me creep your review. Okay Corvid Thanatology what the fuck word crow funerals? Yes you're about to listen to an hour long interview about the grieving behaviors of crows from one of my favorite alive scientists on the planet. It's so good. She's so good. Okay so Corbids quick background belong to a

group of perching birds with a developed focal organ. That's what makes a Corvid. Sometimes these birds are called songbirds but apparently ornithologists have gotten into like almost fistfights about the term songbirds. So which birds are Corbids? Okay they include crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays, magpies, trepies, chuffs and nutcrackers which kind of sounds like an Alice in Wonderland chess set or a roll call of gnomes. Perhaps a menu of local draft beers from Portland but it's a real list. I just read verbatim just to make sure that I don't get any wrong and cause any more ornithological fisticuffs. Anyway we're

talking about crows and how they die. So you're gonna hear about why crows have this death laden reputation and some unsettling science mask facts and we'll hear about desperate alarm calls and feeling like an outsider and how brains work and radioactive tracers and murderers but not the sad kind and plague doctors and all kinds of dark goodness that will have you sitting on a park bench staring into the treetops with this newfound fascination. Once you hear the bonkers tales of biologist and Corbid banatologist Kaley Swift. I'm so excited to talk to you. So here's this, there's your microphone.

First thing that I always do is just ask people to pronounce their first and last name just to make sure that I say it right. Sure. Kaley Swift. Okay just checking. I believe he was pronounced it though. I think it's Dr. Kaley Swift. This is where I just lose my shit about it. I mean how long have you been a doctor? Like 48 hours. Oh my god. No, maybe 72. That's since Friday night at 930. Oh my god. Tell me everything. It has been a whirlwind sprint. I did two degrees in six years. Oh my god. So it was really fast. So Dr. Kaley Swift got her master's in science in animal behavior and neuroethology. I think that's how the brain affects what animals do. I think that's

what that means. At the University of Washington in 2015 and then she launched straight into getting her PhD. She completed her research about crow death behaviors in just over three years. She defended her PhD on the last night possible before the end of the quarter. Like her dissertation was due by midnight that day and this breakneck pace was partly because there was a post-doctorate position in Denali that started right after she wanted to be able to hop over and do that work. Also the first time she mentioned she was moving to Denali for a while I asked if she had to get a lot of travel vaccines and then I realized that Denali is a park in Alaska and not a small island in the malaria belt. Anyway she's very smart and hardworking and she busted proverbial ass

for that PhD. You're not usually under the gun like that. Like how'd you deal with it? I cried a lot. I uh yeah I had a few moments where I was just like oh this is impossible. So I did that. I reached out to my peers and said I need you to text me and tell me I'm gonna do this and everything's gonna be okay and they did it because they were wonderful and I worked really hard. So it's kind of a combination of those three things. Okay so now tell me what it was about crows that made you so interested like oh and when did you start really studying them? Did you always like sit in parks and like high school and stuff and just like gaze at crows or was there a moment? No there was definitely a moment. So I since I was

a little kid loved animals and always really gravitated towards science. I could stare at bugs all day. I just thought they were so cool. I'm with you. Yeah and I could look at pictures of bugs and books and read about them but I wasn't you know I wasn't like journaling as a little kid or taking fastidious notes but then as I got older you know in high school I was sort of like and but as I went into college I had circled back around to wanting to do wildlife sciences or animal behavior more broadly and I didn't really have a preference or an idea of what exactly that would look like and I had in thinking about what kinds of questions really interested me the answer I kept coming back to is this idea of the social intelligence hypothesis

which is this idea that being social and having these complex social lives may have really driven our cognitive advances because it's difficult to do that. It takes a lot of brain power and that question and you know there's lots of nuanced ways that you can look at that that has always really captivated me and so reading Mind of the Raven and being like hmm I like birds, I like animal behavior and cognition and oh look at this there's this whole group of birds that now you know science is collectively saying like oh wow I guess we were super wrong about the capabilities of birds like look at what Gres and Ravens can do. Did they have to issue an apology to birds at some point like fuck man we're sorry you're you got great brains you're doing games

over here like was there a moment in time culturally where we were like we're so sorry birds? I don't know if that has happened but if it hasn't it really should okay yeah and and you know I one of the things I've experienced through my research is still a lot of people don't really realize that and that's been one of the most rewarding things about doing my work is seeing people go wow I had no idea that they did this that's so cool I like crows more now um so that's been like I said just one of the most rewarding parts of the research that I've done uh so yeah so the marriage of all of those things birds and intelligence and animal behavior is what led me to crows and then really serendipitously my undergraduate advisor

at the time I was going through this revelation happened to be working on the facial recognition publication with one John Marsliff who's like the dude when it comes to wearing creepy masks around crows yes yeah it's like you know a handful of crow experts in the united states and he is one of them and so it was like oh this worked out nicely right I mean I feel like in your research were you to google you were someone to google you I feel like photos of you wearing a ghastly mask with like a halloween mask that someone had left in their trunk for several years and but there's you holding a dead crow with the mask on I had okay I have so many questions so really quick dr john marsliff professor of wildlife science at the university of washington was kaley's

phd advisor and he's been studying crows for years you may be familiar with his research in wearing certain masks around crows which showed the hell yes they very much identify human faces and they will squawk up a storm this is technically called scolding when they see a foe kind of like we see in human beings at a professional wrestling match or an episode of the real housewives which let's face it those two scenarios are just two sides of the same coin so for example if a researcher trapped a crow for observation wearing a certain mask most of the local crows in the future will freak out if someone casually walks by them in the same mask human beings might also freak out that they didn't study but they started using this ghastly crow magnet mask and

a dick cheney halloween one but ended up in the end employing some specially made masks later in the study which i'll be honest are kind of creepier because they're like someone's face but just a little bit off so imagine like michael miers with shoulder length hair standing in a park and writing down everything you did on a clipboard but before we get to all of that work specifically let's let's throw this thing in reverse for a second okay i'm gonna start basics i'm gonna go back a little bit difference between a crow and a raven and why do you study crows and not ravens i'm sorry i don't know this i think ravens are bigger no don't apologize at all it's a really common question and why would you know this unless you'd asked somebody earlier um so crows and ravens

are different species but they're in the same genus so like a lion and a tiger okay but they're really superficially similar looking so it's easy to mix them up so that the main things to look for is ravens are about two and a half times the size of a crow okay so i always tell people if you're like out and you see a crow and you go that is the biggest bleep bleep bleep crow i've ever seen it's it's probably because it's a raven um in flight the easiest way to tell them apart is crows have more sort of squared tails versus ravens have this really distinct wedge shaped tail oh and then if you are close enough to see one or see a picture of one you'll notice that the throat feathers on a raven are really textured like a beard versus crows have really smooth

hairlike throat feathers and on a raven we call those special feathers hackles and they articulate them and use them in a lot of visual behavioral displays but that once you you know get a look at a few photos that feature becomes really easy to detect so those are sort of the three big physical ones their voices are really different how are their voices different so uh crows do the classic you know caw and ravens have this much deeper more hollow croak sound never more yeah it's a very and ravens both both species make a huge diversity of really cool noises but personally i think the vocal repertoires of ravens are are cooler than they are for crows don't tell the crows i said that crows are like uh she just defended got her phd and now she's throwing us under the bus

twitter no wait what about um do right can ravens make voices crows ravens and magpies are excellent excellent mimics yes they're they're essentially parrots crazy not maybe not quite the in terms of the um volume of their vocabulary but their accuracy to the human voice outstanding crazy yeah who is creepier or more goth closer ravens i would say ravens okay because they have more of a habit of plucking eyes out of living things crows will do that too but i think ravens have more of that reputation it's pretty hardcore yeah well i'm you know that's skin is thick mammalian skin is thick so if you're hungry i mean you're gonna you're gonna go for the easy part get the good stuff yeah it's very maryland manson man that is halloweeny is all get out so when kaley got to graduate

school she started looking into projects that involved these complex fascinating big bird brains john had already started to do some studies with the functional imaging work that we do where we look at crow brains and he had already been inspired doing that like oh it would be really cool if we would show them a dead crow because humans for a long time have known that crows respond really strongly to their dead this is that idea is not something that i contributed to humankind um and so so he thought that that would be cool uh but in order to do that you really need to have this field component so that you can you know say like this is what they do in their normal environment this is the external manifestation of of their behavior and then we

can look inside their brain and and then try and tell the whole story so their research involves observing the burbs in their natural home externally from afar and then after that they're like hey hey burbs come take a quick science vacation with us just a few weeks we'll look at your brain function before releasing you again into the wild to tell some pretty great alien abduction stories at your next crow party and so we talked about that a lot and the advantages of that project were one that it's awesome uh two it was feasible financially because you know i didn't need expensive tracking devices or tags or anything like that so it was it was low cost which was important because i had zero funding i had gotten an amazing fellowship from nsf to support me

personally through three years of graduate school but it didn't include any research funds and he didn't have any research funds for me those masks aren't free man well so fortunately the masks had already been bought and secured before the previous facial recognition study yeah so i'm just trying to make it work with like what resources are already here where do those masks come from i'm so sorry such a dumb question no not a dumb question because nobody knows the answers they had costume makers come and take molds of actual people's faces so i always tell people to be gentle when they talk about the masks because linda and vivian and joe are all actually real people whoa yeah they which which are not a scary in real life i assure you i'm sure a thousand percent

okay but that's good to know and so you were like i don't have a lot of funding i have zero funding and so this idea that instead of tracking and tagging or killing and dissecting the animals you're like we can look at their brain activity using functional mris so not mris we use a process called fdg pet okay and the reason that we don't use an mri is that you could not train a crow to go into an mri and not have you know a meltdown so they would just they would all their brain activity would be panic yeah that's a good point so basically what we do is we capture crows in the wild and we have an aviary that's fit to house crows the housing is is acceptable for a couple months and we give them a few weeks to get acclimated to captivity and just kind of calm down a little

bit and then the night before we're ready to image a subject we take it into the radiology room and it goes in a smaller cage and we give it overnight to acclimate to that and then the morning that we're ready to image we take the bird out and we inject it with something called fdg which is a modified glucose molecule with a radioactive tracer attached to it oh my gosh so this this is a pet scan like a cancer patient patient would it is exactly the same process my dad had to get a pet scan so and he we had to tell him not to eat carbs for like days before and he was like this is bullshit yeah and that's it that's one of the reasons they have to go in overnight is so that and then they don't get any food basically the idea of this process is so we give them this glucose

injection your brain uses glucose you know as it works whatever part of your brain is working the hardest is going to use the most glucose so once we give them this injection we can show them something like a dead crow or an empty room or the face of a familiar threatening person or a familiar caring person and whatever they're part of their brain is working working working to process that information is going to concentrate that glucose and the reason I described it as a modified glucose molecule is that it's been changed such that the body can't metabolize it anymore so it's just going to stick there and then what happens is after that period where we've shown them the stimulus which we only have about 15 minutes or so to do that we can anesthetize the

bird and put it in the scanner and the scanner you know jim jim jim goes around and it detects where that tracer landed and we have about a 45 minute window before it it starts to degrade and and then once the scanner's done we can take the bird out you know keep it while it wakes up and then it's free to go okay bye are you showing them pictures of birds that they know so that it's familiar and they're like that's my uncle no so that was one major caveat with all of the research that I did we always controlled to make sure that they were unfamiliar birds okay and with the pet images we were we weren't showing them photographs we were showing them actual taxidermy crows right yeah and it was just like on a stool in front of the bird oh my gosh so it'd

be like okay you're gonna go to a hotel overnight in the morning we're gonna take you to the doctor's office we're gonna give you some super weird uh soft drink it has radio tracers in it and then we're going to take you to room with a mummified human being and then we're gonna see what part of your brain lit up yeah and so what parts of their brains would light up when it was another dead crow or just like a pencil so I can't talk about that yet i'm gonna keep that close to the vest until I get it approved by my scientific peers to make sure everything is up to snuff so she's not allowed to say for certain but she did give me a clue that it's one of the three areas perhaps the amygdala which is an area associated with fear acquisition

or something called the ncl which is essentially the avian analog to our prefrontal cortex and it deals with higher cognitive tasks might also however be the hippocampus which is the little brain nugget responsible for learning and memory she can't say yet the paper is going to be published sometime next year I'm earnestly awaiting this like it's oscar nominees okay so if you're not looking at radioactive tracers in a bird head scan what are some things you can see with your own human eyes can you give me an overview of some crow morning behaviors for those who have not seen it or haven't read your research like what happens when crows see a crow die or fly by and be like oh shit there's a dead one like what do they do so the most common response is that the

bird that discovers the body will alarm call and that results in recruitment of other birds to the area to form what we call a mob so if you've ever seen crows go after an eagle or a red tail hawk or your cat that that's what mobbing looks like whoa and that's kind of that's the most common response but that said there's a lot of anecdotes of them doing other things and and john and I get emails all the time from people who we had one woman send us pictures of a crow she saw it was carrying I think like a candy wrapper or some kind of food packaging and it flew up to the dead crow and then it left the wrapper right there by the body I notice you have died here is a twix and we've had other people send us photos of dead crows where they the other crows had left

sticks by the body um so that's that's them you know the more interesting stuff I never witnessed anything like that myself in you know hundreds and hundreds of trials she did see one thing is sometimes about a quarter of the time particularly during the breeding season they come down and they touch the dead crows in a variety of ways and it can be it can manifest as just sort of exploratory touching where they sort of gently kind of poke around with their bills it can be this really aggressive pecking and they'll rip feathers out and pull the wings off and do all kinds of stuff and then in a really small portion about four percent of the time they are sexual they will attempt copulation with the dead crows but we also saw sexual behaviors

manifest in other ways actually like sometimes they would just walk over to the crows and then solicit you know they have this very particular posture when they're getting ready to copulate oh hey you single and then the other really interesting thing we saw is sometimes pairs would come in together and be like oh my gosh that's a dead crow we gotta fuck and they would have sex like immediately yeah and I was there was and then some in the most rare cases one the pair would come in and these birds aren't marked so I believe they were a pair based on all of the observations I had done leading into it but you know I can't absolutely positively guarantee it um but the first the bird would cut they would land on the ground

and the one of them would strut over and be like I'm gonna mate with you and it would get on top and then its partner would get on top of that one and they would have a sex sandwich with the dead crow no yes and the first time I saw this you can just hear me in the video going oh my gosh it's a three way with the flicking they're having sex on top with each other on the crow it's a three way with a dead crow no why are they doing it why are you doing that yeah do they think they're like this will wake them up like is that what they're thinking like I think that they are just thinking I am full of sexy hormones right now because it is my breeding season and there's a thing down here and I am horny and I'm mad because it's on my territory and but I'm also

kind of scared because it's dead and all of those things are happening in me at once so so so I'm just gonna do all of the things like maybe maybe they're on the brim of the apocalypse and this is just the first like patient zero and they're like I gotta get it in before the party's over yeah yeah so my god we can't yeah we don't know yet exactly what is responsible for this behavior but I am very much um under the impression that it's related to the hormonal shifts that they're experiencing in the breeding season and then probably manifesting as this sort of displacement behavior which is essentially when animals are confronted with um conflicting drives sometimes they just do this third thing that's totally unrelated so for example like goals when they're

faced with a competitor and it's kind of like okay am I gonna go fight with this bird or am I gonna run away like I don't know they'll just pull grass because they're like do I run away do I fight okay I don't know I'm just gonna pull grass oh no that's so confusing that's like the worst kind of procrastination yeah that's what I have like a bunch of emails do and a bunch of stuff to write but instead I just like clean out the silverware drawer yeah well at least you're not you know fucking dead people how do you know I'm not okay so this episode is about crow funerals so do they show up in veils do they demand to see will and testaments do they confess to long-term affairs with the dead's best friend

what are some other ways that crows mourn the dead I mean I know that they leave sticks they might circle and and caw are there any other things that you have witnessed in the wild that you're like what not really so one of the things that we've heard is a lot of people were right to us and say you know I saw a vigil of crows and they stood around the body for four hours and I never saw anything like that definitely one thing that happens though is they'll they'll come in and they'll scream and all their neighbors are come in it'll be this really you know ruckus thing for about 15 or 20 minutes so I grabbed that and a few other crow noises for this episode from dr swiss youtube channel which has so many good videos and will be linked via the show notes

she also has some new amazing ones up from her time in the tropical balmy island of denali and then they kind of just start to calm down so it's hard for me to say in those when I get those stories if what people are saying is just kind of the end of this behavior when the birds have started to be like okay well well we made our you know we said our thing yeah um or if if when because you asked earlier you know if we're showing them familiar birds and we're not so if maybe the explanation to some of these other um you know ritual like behaviors is that they do slightly different things if it's a bird that they know and and I can't offer an answer to that just yet and how smart are crows crows are primates essentially really yeah so um I mean not actually

but they're so what's going to be no they're actually monkeys did you not know this alley cut i don't know it's fine it's gonna be okay you are disclaimer crows are not actually monkeys please do not come at me fools yeah it's it's really amazing because the crow brain the avian brain but the crow brain is really quite different in a lot of ways than the mammalian brain and one of the main features that's different is when you close your eyes and you think of a brain you picture something really folded and squishy right yeah avian brains don't have those folds it's totally smooth what so they have managed in that tiny walnut sized package with vastly less surface area to create these systems that do a lot of the same things that primates do just

to give you some examples um crows or corvids there's some evidence that they can count that they have a you know that they can they possess some kind of numerical you know quantitative abilities basically um new caledonian crows were the first species besides chimpanzees that we discovered make and use tools and that distinction between make and use is really important in terms of its you know cognitive implications they there's a lot of studies that suggest that these birds have theory of mind which is essentially the capability to be like i am me and i have my motivations and you are you and you have different motivations um they seem perceptive to when they're being spied on for example uh have is this because you've spied on them

from spying on them i mean i i have definitely had experiences where it seems so for example to to do my field work i always targeted breeding pairs which means i needed to follow them around and identify their nest because i wanted to control i didn't want to be right next to their nest for one experiment and a hundred meters away for another one so i wanted to control that distance so what you're telling me is you were wearing a mask and a wig and you were deliberately following mating couple so the mask doesn't go on until the experiment starts so fortunately because if that had been the case then i i would have never made it out alive this idea of you just like lurking behind a tree and you're like in a full thing just like spying on a mating pair

it's just the best kind of creepy i can possibly think it's the best thing i can think of it's so good no okay so no she was not wearing a mask during this research i'm sorry i just i got excited at the visual but to finish the story she was following and watching breeding pairs building nests and i had multiple experiences where i would be following them around watching them carry sticks to their nesting tree and i'd be like yes i found it look i watched them deposit all these sticks there and then i would like leave and come back and i'd be like huh that that pile hasn't changed at all and i would go and hide and i'd watch them and i realized they were actually nesting in a totally different tree and i 100% think that they were doing it on purpose that they saw me

watching them and were like minus is over here so so that is one reason but there was actually a really brilliantly designed study looking at ravens that more scientifically showed that they are thinking that they're imagining competitors that they can't see which is so incredible but yes the to return to the masks and i did um i should look at my phone i i mean i bet i did one of my experiments like a block from where we are right now really oh yeah i did it all over downtown seattle which was hard it was an adventure because i was working 15 hour days i was getting into downtown seattle at like five in the morning with my scary mask and i i saw a lot of stuff wait like at five in the morning in a mask how many people were

so scared of you it depended so um most most people at five in the morning are not scared of a person in a scary mask is my experience most of the people who are out at five uh see somebody in a mask and they're just kind of like oh mother it's it's like the three o'clock people who get really scared at the mask person did you have a sandwich board or anything that was like so we did so we eventually got it it took a couple of trials before i was like oh we are never going to get through this unless people know and even then i had i had a woman i was doing a um we were doing an experiment at magnuson park which is this really lovely big park in seattle and there's a big play area for kids and we were out in the parking lot right i mean it's not like

we're being inconspicuous i mean how can you be right and we had we had our taxidermied hawk and our crone i'm standing there i've got a clipboard and a camera and my volunteer is helping and um joel williams who uh was my volunteer for my first couple of years and then became my full time taxidermist actually who he is a very he's a very tall man he's about six seven oh my god and he really likes black and camo okay which you know personal style no problem but that combo in a scary mask is not not great and we had a woman come over and she was like you are scaring the crap out of my grandkids and what and i look over the kids and they you know they just have like totally blank neutral faces so i'm like okay and so you know i explain you know i'm sorry

we're doing this research on crows i'm i'm happy to talk to them about science when she's like i think you're lying i'm calling the police no i was like okay that's a elaborate lie but you you do you lady did you take the mask off during this exchange or did you keep it on so i was never the mask wear i always had a volunteer do that fortunately uh so she was talking to me unmasked person and uh and so yes but there was a time where um my volunteer up an officer drove up to one of my volunteers in the mask and made her take it off because there had just been a bank robbery oh no like the day before a masked bank robbery oh no so we had lots of adventures like that and it's you know it's it's one of those

things where these stories can often be because they panned out you know it was never a problem can be funny to tell but it's always you know there's this flinch of of pain when i do so because i recognize how incredibly privileged i am that that the stories always ended up being fine right and the police were like we believe you have a good day right you know and and i have to recognize that there are so many people that could not have done this work safely and that you know there was a lot of in terms of their interactions with with the police and with the general community because another part of what i was doing with this nest searching is walking around neighborhoods with binoculars looking into people's yards so i had to deal with the police or just with the general

public a lot and you know most of the time people were like oh crows i have to tell you this story about this crone it and it ended up being wonderful but um you know there's a certain percentage of the population that just is not ever going to be cool with you just floitering in front of their house in any capacity but especially with binoculars but you're like i'm a white lady just here with some binoculars everyone's like cool have fun yeah yeah and i just you know it was that sucks it was good that we were able to do the research but the broader cultural implications of that sucks because this research is freaking cool and every kind of person should be able to do this research safely i love her and now what is

your background when it comes to stem i saw you tweet something uh yesterday that got like five thousand retweets already about a little bit about your your background and your lead up to getting your phd that that maybe this wasn't wasn't a career that you would have expected or people would have expected of you yeah so i mentioned earlier when i was a kid that i loved that i could just stare at bugs all day and i and i did and teachers would be like kaley we need to learn about division right now and i was like division that's a street and downtown spoke in and i yeah i had a really hard time in school when i was in grade school and it kind of um the culminating moment was we we had an art project in third grade and we had those little

like pinnacle flags you know the triangle flags and i had the wide end on the right hand side and the narrow end on the left hand side and to me it made so much sense that that you're the first letter of your name should start at the wide end and then it should go as it gets smaller and so i wrote my whole name backwards on it that's just made so much sense to me that that's how you do it and my teachers are like yeah we can't deal with this so they um they we had a very intense parent teacher meeting where they were like we're gonna hold kaley back because she cannot read and she's dyslexic and i was like no i don't want to i don't want to do that so i went to a i switched to a school that had a program for kids with um uh who were behind basically who

had all kinds of different learning disabilities and yeah and then i worked up until basically eighth grade i was failing classes regularly i was medicated for a little while and i hated it um and so i told my parents like i have to get off this medication like i will figure out how to make this work and for a couple years i didn't i was unmedicated and i was failing my classes was it like an adhd kind of riddling okay yeah and i went to child therapists and you know like learning therapists and and it was it was really hard and i i cried and just i can remember coming home from school regularly feeling like this was every day it was just the worst day ever um because there was a lot of you know shame coming from my i mean i had close friends but

there was a lot of shame from other kids you know because you're going to the to the class with the kids who were behind and like little kids are just not always nice about that and i just i didn't understand why this was so hard you know i was looking around it was so easy for so many of my peers and i just could not understand these words in front of me or how i was supposed to just sit in a classroom for five hours and not just think about you know bugs and wolves and stuff um and then i moved in eighth right before eighth grade we moved from seattle or excuse me from spokane to seattle and i switched schools again and the level that my new school was at was essentially a year behind where the school i had been at was so i kind of got to repeat the same grade actually

without being held back and something in that eighth grade year just sort of started to click and i had figured out tools for for developing really good time management and then kind of after that things started to settle into place and and school became a little bit easier for me and now you know i still you can see it in my tweets like i'm a terrible speller i make mistakes all the time i've never noticed i'm always like how do you do it because i'm like you're getting your phd your tweets are fire you've got this like super comprehensive blog you're getting published in papers i'm like what kind of time management does this woman have it's astounding yeah so and that is one skill that i i can say that i definitely have and have worked really really hard to make

work for myself um so so yeah so that was you know kind of the story but there were definitely i mean there were so many moments in my life where i was like i'm never gonna exceed and succeed excuse me in school like i'm just i'm not i'm just different from these other children and even when i applied to college i can remember going to certain colleges to you know the admissions office and having people be like uh don't waste your time you are not gonna get in here oh my god and just being like well and now you're doctor and now i'm a doctor and i got an NSF grant so screw you there are many ways to succeed and yeah so that's been that's been just tremendously amazing and i'm so you know happy to to share that story and remind people that it is painful and it

is a lot of work but people figure you know people figured out if you support them if you give them tools and try new things you know it is possible for people to make to figure out how to make it work within this system that's really designed for a very particular type of learner do you think that you developed a lot of empathy that made you more interested in like animal behavior do you think empathy is is part of what you do observing behavior that's a great question i mean i maybe i consider myself an incredibly empathetic person but i think for me the draw to animals was that animals are so non-judgmental right yeah and they just they do their thing and i could watch them from afar and they're beautiful and interesting and and so it was just such a nice escape from

the classroom where i just felt like shit all the time so so i think that was that was mainly what drew me to wildlife that's interesting i'd never thought about it that way but um but yeah i think that when when you struggle yourself with filters uh and how to be and how to assimilate and how to be the person people want you to be versus what you want to be or what you struggle with like yeah you look at animals and it's like i'll sit here in front of you i'll make eye contact and then like my butthole like better and you really get to kind of see um the nature being so unfiltered and i think that is kind of a relief and i think the the patterns in animals uh can be a little bit easier to detect for some people than the patterns in human beings

because humans are so complicated and how has working in corvid thenatology changed maybe your relation to mortality or mourning practices i'm hoping that you haven't had to interface with any like human funerals but do you find yourself looking at it differently i know that's such a good question and i don't have a great answer for that so far because no i mean i have gone through funerals um but for people for whom death was the conclusion of a very well-lived long life and not a surprise and i often wonder if the reason for that that there hasn't been this translation between what i do as a scientist with death and then my perspective personally is because unlike something like a primate or or a cetacean like a whale you know crows in some ways aren't

incredibly human like and i wonder if i was studying primates if i would have more of that experience than i have than i have had studying crows and and i'm not sure of the answer to that but um i feel like we need to have louder more raucous funerals maybe let people scream if they want to yeah yeah someone over there is making out getting a third base i don't know you're like it's morning in all ways um can we do a quick rapid fire round yes okay but before your questions patrons we will scatter some coin to a worthwhile charity and i will shout out which one as soon as i hear back from kailey who is now on a remote island paradise doing bird research because she's the best we've stayed really good friends and i text her all the time about crow

facts she really is so wonderful okay so the donation that we will make in her name to a charity for choosing will be made possible by sponsors who you're gonna hear about now perhaps okay your questions now these are tell me how this works questions from listeners so these are from patrons from the patreon page uh sarah preston first comment just said how weird an amazing no question okay agreed gary jungling says yes do crows wear black to their funerals oh never mind answered my own question look at these jokers right out the back i didn't screen these i had time in there and then i'm finding it delightful um dane godding asks have birds ever been observed using bones of other birds to build their nests so uh i have to my knowledge there's

no bird that like builds a nest primarily out of bones but i do have an example of a raven where the nestling died and so the parents just shoved it into the side of the nest and on the exterior not even on the interior it's not like they just scooted out of the way they like took it out of the nest and they just shoved it into the side of it so does that answer your question oh my god can you imagine it's just like well the baby died yeah well we got a hole in the side of the house anyway wow that's rough yeah they're like we didn't like it anyway um jasmine wells wants to know okay only kind of about bird death but kind of not why is a group of crows called a murderer and do they ever murder each other great question so um and at fyi raven

a group of ravens is often called an unkindness both of those words are not scientific words they're totally colloquial so you'll you'll never hear me see a big group of crows and go oh a murder of crows oh i didn't know that i thought that was just like what we call them like a parliament of owls yeah nope those are totally just lay terms that you'll never see in academic papers wow yeah i know we're just such wet blankets but i mean they're not they seem very very heavily weighted with people's own um kind of subject exactly and so the the origin of those names is probably very closely tied to the relationship that developed between human and crows during the um crusades and kind of through the medieval period where you had a lot of dead bodies and so you had a lot of

scavengers coming to take advantage of those dead bodies and i think that you know the feasting on human corpses by corvids um for people of that time period is a big part of what sort of cemented this this ominous bad relationship and then to boot during the plague that because the smell was so overpowering the doctors would wear these really black birdlike masks where they would that had like a beak and they would stuff you know flowers and other really strong smelling scents in there to so they wouldn't pass out from the smell and they looked like these walking ravens oh my god so i i think that's really where it comes from though interestingly you know that's fairly unique to western cultures in many parts of asia like japan for example these birds aren't signs of

evil or they're they are the birds that hold the most wisdom actually so it's important to recognize that our perspective of the cultural implications of these birds that that is a cultural um norm that's not the case globally now to answer the question do they ever murder each other totally particularly during the breeding season if they can they will absolutely kill a territory intruder and generally they try and get the bird on the ground and then they go for the wing joints and then they go for the head oh my god yeah it's it's really um it's brutal and part of that is because crows engage in extra pericopulation so it you know might be a way to sort of keep that from happening but yeah they are incredibly territorial during the winter that's really rare and

and these killings they don't happen very frequently because most of the time the bird can get away but but yes they will kill each other and it is very dramatic when it happens because the bird that's the victim produces this really specific distress call and that is like a magnet for crows and they all come in and they'll attack the bird that's being attacked or sometimes they'll attack the attacker and the other a really common myth is that they will execute crows that um failed at their job of watchman and there's no evidence of that so wait there are crows that are watchmen so so like in a group feeding situation you're always going to have some birds that are are more sentinels you know they're on more alert and any you know

whenever you see groups of animals feeding in the same place you'll see these kinds of patterns and so a lot of people think you know if a bird didn't do its job watching out for the group and a predator comes in that they'll like go and you know seek revenge on that burden there's no evidence of that oh my god i never heard that um okay so maria kumar wants to know what's been the strangest thing you learned so far in your study of this that they have sex with dead crows charlotte milling wants to know what is the evolutionary significance of a corvid grieving behavior um and if there isn't any why would it become a thing great question so i think the answer to that is and we've been able to demonstrate some aspects of this in our research

that it is a way for them to learn about and avoid danger and i i think that's you know probably going to be the crux the sort of seed of these behaviors in most animals including ourselves if you're a social species and you are capable of the kind of rapid complex learning that crows and other you know primates and cetaceans and humans are capable of it makes sense that if you see a dead member of your species you'd be like uh oh what happened like how do i make sure this doesn't happen to me um and so i i really think that that's kind of the foundation of this behavior and from there i think it can and in compliment to that i think you can include a lot of other motivations too um but i i think that's probably the adaptive reason how it

starts that makes sense gen evans had a great question do crows react differently to a natural death old age versus an unnatural death like an injury or poisoning because if they're doing it to learn how not to have it happen are they like how do i not get old and die like does that never enter their brains great question and i don't know the answer to that but that i mean that certainly could have been another one of the aspects i looked at you know as in terms of my graduate studies and it wasn't but like that's one of the next steps i absolutely think that we should take in this line of questioning for real like someone else get on it pass the mask down i mean you're like you're on deck go to the park with a clipboard aki wants to know do crows visit the burial

place of other crows and do they bring offerings to pay their respects you mentioned that sometimes you see them toss sticks over there mostly i don't know my suspicion is that once they come in and do their thing they're not coming back right because that's an energy investment but it's also could be dangerous right i mean you could have scavengers lurking in that area and in fact my research suggests that crows are more are more wary in the places the immediate locations where they find dead crows in the days that follow so my guess would be that you know they're not coming in to check those locations even from afar once once they go through their their thing and what usually kills crows are we talking hawks we're talking babies it depends on the age class uh first year

birds so baby crows have about a 50 survivorship rate in places like seattle and they're getting taken out by things like cars and cats and you know window strikes and just lots of stuff adult crows have a much higher survivorship about 80 and they're getting killed by things like red tail hawks and eagles and great horned owls and sometimes they'll kill it eat part of it and then just like peace out yeah no yeah they're like i'm done here that would confuse me because like if i order a burrito i'm finishing the burrito do you know what i mean yeah but you gotta think like especially in an urban environment there's they're having to contend with a lot of disruptions so sometimes it's just not worth it because you know somebody's walking their dog like you gotta

fly up and then you're like i'm gonna just wait here i could just go catch another one or maybe i'm full or whatever um yeah little to go boxes yeah their talents can i get this wrapped up um donna tell austin wants to know can you determine the cause of death just by looking or you know watching the decomposition of a bird uh no i can't there are people there are amazing avian pathologist folks that work for you know government agencies whose job it is that is their whole job is that they get body sent to them and they have to figure out the cause of death to try and figure out if somebody's doing something you know that requires legal action but i'm not not that person i can look and you know feathers have been pulled out it's clearly a

raptor that did it if the neck is broken and they're by a house it's probably a window strike if it's disease i mean that can be really hard to detect unless you do a um necropsy where you actually cut the bird open mm-hmm so just looking at it you can't be like it died of sadness no just checking ariel wants to know do crows ever engage in cannibalism that's a yes right uh yes so are it has been observed but it's really really rare so i think i think a lot of people would guess if they didn't know much about crows aside from the fact that these are birds that they see eat a lot of garbage and roadkill they might guess that they are totally eating dead crows all the time and it seems like a pretty rare behavior that's

more biased towards inexperienced younger birds wow so they're not living up to the murder name no sincerely interesting jordan o wants to know why do crows gather in such large numbers at certain times of the year i'm talking thousands he says yes or they say yeah great question so crows engage in what we call communal roosting and this is not an uncommon behavior in birds so during the mating season the spring break swipe right let's get it on season it's all couples skate all the time but when there's a chill in the air and the leaves drop things change come fall crows start to all group together and sleep in central locations called roosts so in seattle for example and i totally recommend you check this out ali if you have enough time

we have two big roosts and one of them is at the udub bothel campus that house about 15 000 birds every night what it's amazing yeah and you stand there's this incredible viewing area on top of one of the parking lots and it's just a river a river of crows oh my god and it's incredible i looked up a video of this and it seems like CGI it's this gorgeous tide in the dusky sky and it's beautiful and captivating and yes a little scary kind of like watching a thunderstorm or an activated mob shoveling through the mall on christmas eve ravens do this too and it it's probably driven by a couple of different things the main one is is predator aversion right safety and numbers um but it might also serve as you know an information exchange center there isn't

good evidence of that in crows but there's really good evidence of that in ravens actually where they go to roost to tell other ravens about where food is oh my god yes which is we can get into that but it's not an altruistic thing it's just i need buddies in order to like get this food you know maybe it's where they meet you know socialize and meet potential mates or or whatever but um but yeah so that that you know the rivers of crows or the big numbers at certain times of years is basically during the non-breeding season crows all get together at night to sleep uh mostly for safety and numbers but probably for other reasons too is it wrong to find that cute no it's like a big sleepover i know i think it's cute i know it's so and it's just it's powerful and one

the things i always like to tell people is uh for folks living in urban areas we watch things like planet earth and we see these amazing animal migrations caribou and wildebeest or the you know monarch butterflies and you're like this oh my gosh that's so cool like i want to see something like that in my life and you can because this is a totally natural behavior that crows do where they group in these big numbers and if you live in a place like seattle or many other metropolitan areas across the country you you can watch crows gather in the tens to hundreds of thousands depending on where you are and you can have that experience of this mass collection of wildlife and i i just think that one of my favorite parts about crows is this

opportunity that they present for people living in areas where they maybe otherwise don't feel a huge connection to the natural world or two natural spaces to really engage with this animal that is native to that area and participates in so many cool behaviors whether it's this mass roosting or just how smart they are and this attentiveness that they have to us and so for the urban night they are just such an incredible opportunity for natural history and for wildlife viewing so you can have an at and burrow moment like in the middle of downtown yeah just peep up some crows yeah it's awesome that's really inspiring because that is that is one of those birds we take for granted so much so much yeah but they're staring at them i know but

they're just they belong in our urban spaces they got there naturally and shit they just do so many cool things i mean they play do they play yes they do and one of my favorite uh i have two great playing stories one of them was so all over seattle we have these ornament ornamental trees called sweet gum trees yes they're the ones that make the sidewalks really sticky and they have these circular like ping pong sized cones and they're really spiky but if you like you know get your foot on top of them kind of roll your foot around you can smush down all the spikes and then they just like literally turn into a ping pong and i was out at green lake and i saw this crown it had one and it would fly up into the air and it would drop it and then it would fly down and catch it

right before it landed on the ground and it did it you know five times until i took my phone out to videotape and then i was like oh no i'm done it's like mom i don't share these stories to like create this hierarchy of things that we should appreciate but like these behaviors you're not going to see in chickadees you're going to see other cool things in chickadees but there's just there is something really special about crows and i i encourage people who just think of them as these like icky trash birds uh to to watch them and appreciate that there's this really soft side you know they have they mate for life and they can live to be 17 years old and they spend a lot of time reinforcing that bond and it's adorable yeah they like how so aloe preening is the main way that

birds do that which means um mutual grooming so you'll see one bird kind of like tilt its head down and the other one will use its beak and it'll sort of like you know um groom the feathers on the neck and around the face you know the area where the individual can't reach um so that you'll see that really typically and they're watching you back right i mean like again chickadees are cool and do a lot of cool things that is nuts to think that the a crow is like on the gun the male again are they're like oh who's this guy coming over yeah nuts it is okay prepare for the sweetest story that you may not be able to handle okay here we go uh on my blog i i used to talk a lot more about go which go is one of my first data points it was a bird that i did my uh one of

you know one of my subjects for my first field experiment and then after that experiment ended because part of that experiment was feeding the birds it had gotten used to me you know coming every day and putting food on the ground and i was never the scary person so they sort of continued like me after the study ends and uh it was a campus bird it was right by my bus stop actually and so after the experiment ended go and whose name is derived from her bands which was green over orange uh would always like you know fly over to me and be like hey what's up can i am i gonna get that peanut and and it was this amazing i loved my favorite part about it was when i was walking i could hear her bands jingle so i i could hear when she was following me around and it was just

like there's i mean just you feel like snow white it's just amazing to have this wild animal that's like i know you can i have some food that is weird because you just think that they'd be so indifferent to you but it's like oh it's that lady yeah and and that's the difference between crows and a lot of birds because you can hand you know you can train a lot like chickadees i don't know why i picked them but chickadees are like what what who me yeah but you can you know like in stanley park in vancouver for example there's a or there used to be a place where you know there's a there's a guy and he'd hand you a little birdseed and you'd put it in your palm and chickadees would flock to you right because they they learn that it's okay to feed from people but they're not discriminating

among those people versus crows are like you you feed me and i'm cool with you and i will get close to you but not to these other people um and it's just incredible and and the reason i said i used to talk a lot more about go is um she she died last year how do you know because because she was banded some when somebody found her body they reported her and what happened i we don't know yeah it was it was the middle of summer so her body had already um decompote you know beyond yeah our ability to detect but she was at least 16 whoa so yeah good life so she maybe died of old age yeah who knows i hope they gave her a good send off i hope so too and i um i collected her body you did i did so i actually i have her bands you do i have a little leg i have her

her bones and her bands in a little box and i um my husband for a graduation present actually commissioned a portrait of her so i think i'm going to create like a shadow box with her with the picture medicine mayfield did the illustration she's an amazing natural history illustrator uh based out of australia and um and so i'm going to have a little shadow box with her portrait and then her bands because i i like loved this bird so much yeah she was this yeah i don't know how to describe it it's just incredible when you found out oh i cried yeah and i have a whole blog post about saying goodbye to her and um because she you know i did this research because i love these birds and because she was really close to my office um like i said once the experiment

was over and i could start to engage with her you know in a more casual way in an uncontrolled way i would often go to her territory when i was just like bent out of shape and stressed and she would fly over to me and and i would look at her and you know give her peanut or whatever and i just sort of would breathe inspire me to keep doing the work i was doing because i was like i love these birds everyone needs to love these birds like i wonder if this is going to make anyone make a new crow friend at the bus stop you totally should i mean you know don't don't overdo it with the food because we you can sort of exceed the uh caring capacity of your neighborhood and it can be consequential but um you know i always have you know a couple of peanuts in my

pocket really yeah and then you know i see a crow and i toss it in that and you're like hey what's up yeah do you really always have peanuts in your pocket yeah that's the best yeah it's it makes doing laundry kind of annoying for my husband sometimes oh my god now what is the what is the shittiest thing about your job i mean i imagine the passing of of a beloved specimen but what what sucks about what you do uh the hardest thing about what i was doing was was working in an environment where i really regularly had to deal with people um because that was often also the best part right because that i mean that's where my science communication took off was just having to explain constantly what i was doing but you know sometimes when you're just you're i'm at work

when i'm there right it'd be like people constantly coming up to you and whatever job you're doing being like hey what are you doing can you explain to me and then the best was when i'd be like i you know oh i'm doing i'm with the university of washington i'm doing this field study on crows but you know what my birds they're here i gotta take data um you know i'm i'll be done in 30 minutes happy to come back if you want to point out your house and i'll tell you more and they'd be like oh no i totally get it that's cool so the other day i though i want to and i just be like i feel you're not listening to me and so sometimes it'd be a little bit frustrating the day to day of making a field experiment work when you are combating people walking their dogs or people

using leaf blowers i hate leaf blowers they're the worst and they'd be like oh it's a dead crow here let me blow it away with my leaf blower and i'm just like no god i've been here for hours and you just ruined everything oh no that part just you know after years of this kind of urban field work is really um it just grates on you and just especially when i was working in downtown seattle just a number of times where i just genuinely felt unsafe you know where i was i'm you know a woman there's lots of people around and yet sometimes you know you get that dude and he's just staring and he's too close yeah and you're like i just want to be in the woods you're like i want to go in the safety where there's just wolves and badgers and bears exactly which is why i'm going to denali

next i'm like i'm ready to have to worry about different kinds of predators now what is i don't even know how you're gonna answer this but what is the best thing about what you do what do you love the most about crows or about your work or about the work that you did to get your phd i mean i feel like this whole podcast has been the answer to that question i mean i the thing i love most about crows is that they are so interesting and they are full of surprises which sometimes was the worst thing right because then i'd be like god damn it why can't you just make this work i am trying so hard um but yeah i mean just the day-to-day of getting to watch an animal that's so interesting and dynamic is amazing getting to talk to people

about this animal and watch them light up when they're like oh can i tell you my crow story or just that moment of people saying wow i i had no idea i guess crows are maybe cooler than i thought i mean that's kind of like at the end of the day that shift is how we build empathy with the natural world so you know all of those things that that's why i do it that's why i love it and where can people find your work because you tweet magnificently thank you so folks can find me uh corvid research is the short answer to that question corvid research on twitter corvid research on instagram corvid research dot blog good job continuity of socials is so helpful yes it is you really had good foresight on that and so people can reach out share with you cool pictures

of birds maybe ask you questions yeah so thank you so so much for being here i'm never gonna look at a crow the same good that's my job so i did my job and i think for halloween i want to be someone researching crows yes that's my costume thank you again thank you so much so find smart people ask them stupid questions whether it's your huge science hero or if it's a lady feeding a peanut to a bird at a bus stop huh that was a trick because in this case they could be the same person so once again find and follow dr kaley swift she's at corvid research on instagram on twitter the blog is corvid research dot blog look up her videos on youtube she's kaley swift on there and keep an eye out for more of her published work and the next time you see a crow look up

maybe give it a little thumbs up because they deserve our respect they are very complex animals also be nice because they will fucking remember if you are a mean jabroni to them you can follow oligies at oligies on twitter and on instagram and i'm ali ward with one l on both more links are up at ali ward dot com slash oligies and patreon.com slash oligies is where you go to become a patron if you want to submit questions to the oligists before i record you can be a patron for as little as a dollar a month 25 cents an episode my heart is cheap oligies merch.com has cool shirts and hats and pens so you can find other oligites in the wild thank you shannon feltas and bonnie dutch for managing that uh the oligies facebook group is full of the kind and

the curious and it is moderated by the kind and the curious herron talbert the theme song was written and performed by nick thorber of the band islands and all the audio stitching together is done by the lovely genius steven ray morris who also hosts the per cast about cats and see Jurassic right which is a podcast about dinosaurs and at the end of each episode i do tell you a secret for those who stick it out past the credits this secret just happened like 10 minutes ago i'm wearing a hoodie i wear all the time it's very cozy i just reached in the pocket and there was a dried wizened tiny lemon in the pocket it's like almost ossified i have no idea how long it's been there i don't know when this got in my pocket my estimate is at least one month how has this

tiny dead lemon not fallen out of the pocket before how have i not realized this it is the horseplay of a ghost okay that's it hi there's rustle crow Cameron crow crow diddly fume cronin craig ree peck