This "sick Corvid behavior" reminds me of some "strange Alcid behavior"
we witnessed at the Farallon Islands.

We had a population of individually color-banded Pigeon Guillemots. One
day we saw one of the banded adult males actively mounting and copulating
with another guillemot. Strangely, the guillemot on the bottom made no
movements, but just seemed to lie there through all this earnest activity
by the bird on top. Following the copulation, the guillemot on top moved
off, but the bird on the bottom never budged. Puzzled, we climbed over
to the site and found that the bird on the bottom was stone-cold dead.
To complicate matters even more, we discovered that the bottom guillemot
was another of our banded males.

We briefly discussed publishing an article on gay necrophilia in the
Alcidae. But I think it shows, like Burt Guttman says, that birds (like
many animals, including humans??) may perceive and do unusual things
based on what their hormones and/or brains tell them to do that moment.
If you seriously watch animals long enough, inevitably you're going to
see many strange things that don't fit our perception of "normal"
behavior. Look at Jane Goodall's chimp studies -- if she had stopped
after a year or two, how differently we might perceive chimpanzee
behavior. Like a wildlife professor of mine said, "You don't know
anything about a species until you've watched it for at least a couple
thousand hours."

Bob Boekelheide
Sequim

>Burt Guttman said:
>
>"This is largely a question of perception. We humans see the live jay
>eating a dead jay as cannibalism, because we can see that they're the same
>species. The jays don't see the world that way. When jays are jumping
>around and doing jaylike things, they perceive one another as jays, and
>they engage in mutual jaylike behaviors. But once the jay is just a piece
>of meat lying on the ground, the live jay gets no clues from it indicating
>it should be treated differently from any other piece of meat lying on the
>ground. Same kind of change can occur with gulls and probably other
>species. ... "
>
>
>Crows would seem to be a big exception to this. I've heard so much from
>Tweeters and elsewhere about how crows treat dead crows with ritualistic
>behaviors that as far as I have heard do not include eating them. What do
>other corvids such as Ravens do in this regard?
>
>Andrea Grad
>Alki
>agrad at helsell.com