Daily Mass Murder... Of Crows

Yesterday I posted Holy Crow! as my Facebook status, and much to some folk's disappointment, I was actually talking about crows. (Not everything can be movie-related, after all. That's just too predictable.) But, I'm telling ya, if you had seen what I saw, you'd exclaim the same thing.

However, this evening I learned that yesterday's visit by a mass murder of crows was not a unique event. Tonight, at almost exactly the same time, around 6:30 p.m., hundreds... no, wait... make that THOUSANDS (Seriously! And I'm not one to exaggerate... ) of crows flocked in, landing on nearby rooftops, telephone wires, and anything else they could perch themselves on. They arrived in overlapping shifts, hundreds flying in and out at a time. On and on and on and on....

I'm sure some wouldn't find this interesting, but I was absolutely captivated!

Since I was done my tweaks for the day, and just waiting around for Jim, (who was trudging through 9 very long hours of location hunting), I stood by my office window and watched them. Some would land on the room just below my window and look up at me. They'd sip from puddles and compete for scraps that others had brought along.

Some crows were large. Some small. Some had nice, shiny plumage, while their brothers n' sisters were dull or missing a few feathers. One had an unusual white patch on his wing - which could've been anything. Some cawed, while others chattered or clucked. Some hopped. Some scuttled. All flew. And when they flew, it was like rush hour traffic in the sky.

I wanted to throw a little chunk of granola bar or pita bread out the window... but I've seen The Birds. It scared the friggin' bejesus outta me as a child! (Not so much as an adult though, I hafta say...) Anyhow, I figured I was safer just quietly watching them, than drawing all 2000 directly to my window sill. BTW, I totally misjudged yesterday when I said there was about 200. Pfft! There's no way... There's thousands of them altogether. Easily thousands!

I admired them for a while, before sitting back at my desk to resume my painfully bored expression while I waited for an email that would answer some of my script questions, when just like clockwork, by 6:50 silence fell over the office. You could hear a pin drop. (Mostly because almost everyone was still location scouting and the office was nearly empty all day.) But when I looked out my window, I saw that they were all gone. Every single one of them!

Where did they come from? Where were they going? And why so many?

I did a quick Google for "thousands of crows Vancouver" just this second, and came across the following article on animaltourism.com. (Just an FYI, our office is pretty close to Willingdon Ave.)

Vancouver Suburb Burnaby Loves Its Crows

Burnaby Crows by Magalie L’Abbé

When crows pick a town to roost in, locals tend to react badly. They think it’s spooky, worry about guano and try to do ridiculous things to drive them off–like shoot them. But one Canadian city sees it another way. Burnaby, BC, loves its crow roost. Thousands of crows have been sleeping together in the seaside town east of Vancouver since at least the 1970s.

“If you go around dusk they cover the sky,” says Kelsey Downey, marketing coordinator for Tourism Burnaby. “I used to go to school right in the area and it’s a pretty amazing site.”

The crows fly eastward over the city at dusk. They’re more concentrated in the winter. And they tend to be seen most around Willingdon Avenue, which is an exit off Highway 1. Downey recommends checking out Still Creek Drive, which runs next to the highway.

Burnaby sticks up for their crows. Kirsten Starcher, who writes the blog Crows to Burnaby [which is really more about arts than crows] is just one of the residents who fretted when a Costco displaced one of the big roost sites in 2006 about how it would impact their crows. “It was sad to lose it,” one crow fan told theVancouver Sun at the time. Another protested on YouTube.

About 500 students each painted their own model crow for an art project Along the Flight Path, that fixed the crows to a fence.  A Vancouver tourism site boasted that the Northwestern Crow was the most conspicuous local bird and that Burnaby had “easily the most amazing gathering in the province.” Crows.net says the Burnaby is “one of the most renowned crow roosts.” It’s great to see a town that appreciates its wildlife.

Here's another interesting article I just found on Canada.com from 2006, where they estimate there to be 20,000 - 32,000 of them. WOW!

See! I'm not a liar. There were thousands of them!

As lame as it sounds, now that I know I can expect a crow show every evening at dusk, it makes late evenings at the office that much more fun. ;) Tonight was no different than the last. We weren't outta there until 8:30 again, and we're back in at 8 a.m. tomorrow. We're pullin' some long days... and I expect that they'll only get longer as we near production. But that's okay. It's nothing to crow about, because I know it'll be totally worth it in the end!