This photo could be from any suburban street in Australia – but a remarkable detail reveals a little-known fact about the natural world that will blow your mind
- Cockatoos snapped “grieving” dead bird
- ‘Bird burials’ have often been observed
A crackling of cockatoos is snapped into a haunting image that appears to be mourning one of their dead.
The photo, taken outside Minerva School in southern Sydney, shows a white cockatoo squashed in the middle of a suburban intersection – with a swarm of its ilk evenly spaced like mourners at a funeral watching from above as they perch on electricity wires along the street.
A Reddit user who captured the touching moment was convinced the birds were showing grief and saying goodbye.
A Reddit user posted what appears to be a cockatoo ‘funeral’ as dozens of birds gather around a fallen specimen of their number
“Cockatoos paying respect to a fallen comrade this morning,” the user captioned the image.
While some have been skeptical, bird “burials” have been well documented by scientists and wildlife experts — though little is known about the phenomenon.
A 2012 University of California study of western scrub jay “burials” suggested that the behavior is likely to share information about an area’s potential danger.
Bird species have also been observed to ‘cry’ after loss.
“One morning we had a cockatoo that was screaming at the top of its lungs from about 4:30am,” said one commenter.
“Around 7 am I finally went outside to see what was going on only to find it on the power lines above a dead cockatoo.”
Another wrote: ‘I once came across a magpie funeral with 30 magpies all looking down on their dead mate. It made me cry a little. Birds are cool.’