Do animals have any concept of mortality? Does the fear of death keep a dormouse from sleep? Well, there is some anecdotal evidence that this might be the case, particularly with animals that live in complex social groups, such as elephants. But of course, it's hard if not impossible to penetrate the barriers to communication that separate one species from another (and which suggests to me that if we ever do meet aliens from another world we'll spend most of our time trying to figure out what they're saying).

Whatever the truth of the matter, I'd like to tell you about an occasion that I saw (note, I'm not 'sharing' this with you, I'm 'telling' you - if I was sharing I'd have to break off some of the memories and give them to you to keep, thus meaning that each time I 'shared' this story there would be less and less to tell).

Driving home one afternoon some years ago, I noticed something unusual as I approached the house. Black and white, it resolved, as I got closer, into the bodies of two magpies lying in the street just opposite my house. Pulling up, the two dead birds were just a few feet away from me in the road. They must have been hit by a car, I presumed, although it was strange to see two birds killed like this, apparently simultaneously. To be honest, I wasn't sure what to do. I hate to see the way an animal's body is mangled if left in the road, but on the other hand squeamishness made me reluctant to touch the dead creatures. So I took the easier path, and did nothing. Still, the birds were not lying out in the middle of the road and were thus not so likely to get squashed by every passing vehicle.

Going into the house, I noticed that there seemed to be quite a few magpies flying around in their ungainly fashion, or dipping their heads forward as they grackled. But the days when that old rhyme:

one for sorrow, two for joy,
three for a girl, four for a boy

would almost invariably indicate bad days ahead on spotting a magpie are long gone. Now if you see one you can pretty well guarantee seeing another two or three. So I thought nothing much of it, went inside and did what every Englishman does when he gets home: puts on the kettle and makes a nice cup of tea.

But before I had the chance to settle back and enjoy the tea, something caught my attention. The kitchen is at the back of the house, looking out over the back garden and a park beyond, and it was the flash of black and white against green that caught my eye. Once or twice, well, shake one's head and ignore it. But three, four, five, six times. What was going on? I opened the door and went out the back. It was the sound I noticed first. There is always a background noise in London: traffic, trains, planes, the sussuration of a technological civilisation. But now, a raucous, raw sound overwhelmed that. The sound of birds, magpies, calling, cawing. Looking up, I could see what seemed like twenty or thirty birds scrabbling over the tiled roofs of the houses in the row. But they all had their tails to me, and were looking in the opposite direction.

I went back inside, through the house and out of the front door. And stopped. This side of the street and the other, to the left and to the right, the roofs of the houses were covered in magpies. Not twenty or thirty, but a hundred or more, all cawing, grackling, and scraping. And the object of the hundreds of bright black eyes? The two dead magpies that lay in the road.
Sudden, rather unwelcome, images from Alfred Hitchcock's film 'The Birds' came to mind at that point. I have never seen such a collection of magpies, before or since. And none of them were going about the normal business of magpies. Instead they had all settled on the rooftops, giving cacophonous voice to what seemed like, I don't know - distress, a valedictory address, a wake? - for their two fallen comrades, lying dead in the road.

There was only one thing I could do. The birds were still warm when I picked them up. The cacophony suddenly died away to the nearest approach to silence that London gets. The two magpies must have been killed only minutes before I got home. In the sudden silence I moved the dead birds out of the road, where inevitably they would have been in the end dismembered by passing traffic, and laid them on the grass verge. I looked up. Hundreds of pairs of bright black eyes were watching me. I wanted to say something to those strange, fierce minds behind the eyes, but there was a gulf immeasurable between us. I went inside and closed the door.

So, there you have it. Maybe this means something else entirely, but I can honestly say I've never seen behaviour like this on any other occasion (nor have I ever seen so many magpies gathered together). Did those birds understand and mourn the deaths of their comrades? I don't know. But it was undoubtedly one of the strangest things I have ever seen.