I have seen a crow funeral. Quite an affair to behold.
My experience is that if you shoot a crow and leave it on the ground below the tree it was perched in, the other crows will stay away for about a month
There was an old cartoon about that. I think MGM. Little boy has a bee bee gun and really enjoys shooting at things. He goes outside and shoots at a juvenile crow, who falls down dead. The other crows gather ‘round and sing a mournful dirge (are there any happy dirges? OK. Wizard of Oz.) for their fallen child. The boy is beside himself with grief and guilt and cries the night away. In the morning, a raindrop awakens the young crow (can’t have death in a kiddy cartoon), and all the other crows rejoice.
They later did the same thing with a baby polar bear, but the hunters just shot him and went off in their kayaks because the bears were PO’d. Mournful dirge. Miraculous revival. But they’re not as social as crows and ravens, so that’s only relevant to how animation studios recycle concepts, of which Disney is the worst. They actually did a Lady and the Tramp II, which was awful, except that they had Don Knots as a dog catcher, and the art work was really good. How’d I get off the topic of crows?
“I have seen a crow funeral.”
I’ll go you one better - I caused a crow funeral. I was on the first hole of a golf course in Oak Creek AZ (near Sedona) making my second shot. Some crows were gathered on the fairway between my location & the green. I hit a low screamer that was going directly over the crows when they took flight which caused one of them to be hit by my ball.
The obviously dead crow fell to the ground & the rest of them returned to walk around the dead one while making much noise, looking at me with their evil black eyes. They continued to follow me for a few holes while continuing their incessant cawing to harass me.