Crows death- causes sex?

Crows, like the majority of birds, have no penises. Instead of penetrative sex, they basically bring vents underneath their tails into contact. To do this, a male needs to revolve his tail underneath a female’s, but as the dead crow was lying their belly down, that was not possible. “It was similar to observing a kid standing on a piece of cardboard and trying to pick it up,” Swift who studies on birds behaviors at the University of Washington says. “It was thrashing about awkwardly.”

Swift and her colleague Joel Williams stuffed them procured dozens of crows from the museum’s freezers,. Then Swift drove throughout Seattle and its nearest cities looking for crow nests. When she found them, she was patiently waited for the owners to leave, before placing a dead bird on the footway. “People frequently or often called the police,” she says. “They see someone with binoculars and a camera near their home.” Over three consecutive summers, Swift observed the responses of hundreds of crows to their dead peers.

Most often, she found that the birds made alarm calls from afar, or speedily and rapidly dive-bombed on the bodies. This fits with the idea that they usually treat dead crows as signs of danger. But in 24 % of the cases, something overwhelmed those instincts and the birds would touch, pull, drag, or peck at the corpses. And in 4 % of the cases, these encounters turned sexual. “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,” Swift told The Atlantic.