Wood pigeons are our largest and commonest pigeon. They have small, round, grey heads, white neck patches, a pink breast, and greyish bodies.

BirdNote^®
Where Do Birds Go to Die?
Written by Bob Sundstrom
This is BirdNote.
Birds, with their natural grace and beauty, the magic of flight, stupendous feats of migration, and brilliant songs, seem to be all around us. But every bird, like all living creatures, at some point reaches the end of its life. And yet, despite the millions upon millions of birds in the wild, we rarely come across those that have died.
It’s tempting to think there’s a secret, unknown place like the mythical “elephants’ graveyard” that birds are drawn to as they feel their life coming to an end.
The truth is probably closer to a process that birds share with other animals. When birds feel weak or suffer from illness or injury, they may seek safe, secluded places in which to gather their strength and try to recover. Perhaps on the ground, under dense cover. Or perched deep in the shelter of thick foliage, hidden from view and potential predators.
So when death comes, a bird’s body is hidden. It’s very light in mass for its size and doesn’t long persist. Scavengers salvage what they can. Nutrients from the body return to the earth, enriching the soil. And small animals may consume the bones, a rich source of calcium.
In a very short time, all that’s left are the feathers. Reminders of the natural grace and beauty a bird showed us during its lifetime.
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Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. BirdNote’s theme music was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Sallie Bodie
© 2016 Tune In to Nature.org October 2016/2020 Narrator: Michael Stein
ID# death-01-2016-10-18 death-01
Related links:
http://www.besgroup.org/2008/05/12/where-do-birds-go-when-they-die/
http://www.rspb.org.uk/makeahomeforwildlife/advice/expert/previous/dead…
A.D. Hope poem, “The Death of the Bird” http://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/death-bird-1251#.V69F01QrLy0

By Katherine Ellen Foley

Health and science reporter

Crows may be the homicide detectives of the avian world.

Despite birds’ reputation for being, well, bird-brained, crows and other members of the corvid family—which includes ravens and magpies—are actually quite intelligent. They’ve shown an ability to understand basic cause-and-effect relationships, use tools to gather food, and recognize (paywall) individual faces. Now, research suggests crows may even go sleuthing when one of their kind dies, part of a biological inclination to identify future threats.

When faced with a person holding a dead crow, other crows will send out a warning call, called “scolding,”according to a study from the University of Washington in Seattle, published (paywall) in the journal Animal Behavior last year. To conduct the experiment, researchers—led by graduate student Kaeli Swift—placed snacks on the ground to attract crows. Once the snack spot became popular, they carried a dead crow (stuffed) out near the food. (All volunteers wore a latex mask to blend their own identities.) To draw comparisons, researchers also stood next to the feeding area with a taxidermied red-tailed hawk (an animal that preys on crows),a stuffed pigeon, or with nothing.

When researchers stood near the food with dead crows or hawks, nearby crows would “scold” loudly in front of their fellow crows; sometimes they would even attack the masked volunteer. Even when researchers returned multiple times afterwards with no dead birds in hand, the crows would still re-up their warning cry, suggesting they retained knowledge of potential threats.

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By contrast, the crows did not react to the sight of a taxidermied pigeon—possibly because they scavenge dead pigeons.

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When researchers conducted the same experiment with only pigeons (a live pigeon seeing a volunteer holding a dead pigeon), the pigeons didn’t react, suggesting crows may be unique in their willingness to alert other members of their species to threats.

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However bizarre, a crow’s ability to remember people they associate with death is crucial to how they interact with humans. “[As a crow], some people will kill you, other people will feed you,” John Marzluff, a biologist at the University of Washington and co-author of the paper, told National Geographic. Crows’ survival depends on differentiating friend from foe.