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A sleepy urbanite's plea: bye, bye black birds
Yes, crows are clever, and wonderfully adapted to city life, but couldn't they fit in more quietly, or much farther away?
Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, July 14, 2007

>From the first whisper of spring, I have been battling crows for sovereignty in the garden.

Two pairs have taken up residence outside my bedroom window. They wake at dawn and begin their raucous cawing that goes on all day. Sometimes it's just one. Sometimes it's tag-team cawing. Other times there's the cacophony of an all-crow shout-out. Even the seagulls can't be heard above the racket.

I survived -- just barely -- the baby crows learning to swoop. I'm surviving -- just barely -- the almost daily cleanup of crow poop.

I figured the patio fountain was the attraction after I was wakened the other morning at 5:30 by two crows gleefully sharing a bath. I drained it.

This weekend, I found a half-devoured bone in it -- a bone that I hope was a scavenged chicken bone.

Was the dropped bone yet another provocation? Or was it a threat from the crows, who are collectively (and aptly) known as a murder?

My anthropomorphizing of crows is completely irrational. But they are depriving me of sleep and driving me to distraction.

I'm not alone. The Lower Mainland is suffering not just from murders of crows, but a plague of them.

I've tried everything to frighten them away. I put the hose setting on jet and fired away at one sitting on a hemlock branch. He simply hunched his shoulders, stared down with his beady eyes and took it. I bear him some grudging admiration for that.

Richard Cannings, a respected biologist who teaches at the University of British Columbia, recently published An Enchantment of Birds: Memories from a Birders' Life. It has a whole chapter singing the praises of the crow.

When I called him at home in Naramata, Cannings acknowledged that his admiration for the "remarkably intelligent" birds would likely be sorely tested if they roosted outside his bedroom. "They know all sorts of devious ways to stay alive," he noted.

What controls the population of crows, he said, is the food supply. But crows are omnivores. They'll eat everything from baby birds to Big Macs.

As Cannings says in his book, "Crows are one of the few kinds of native birds that have clearly benefited from the dramatic habitat changes affecting North America since the arrival of European settlers."

For the past 30 years, rural crows have been flocking to the smorgasbord of the Lower Mainland. Cannings says the crow population rose dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s in a plague similar to what anecdotally seems to be happening now before stabilizing in the 1990s.

Not only did the population stabilize in the 1990s, something very unusual occurred. Normally, crows cluster is groups called roosts of a few hundred or even a few thousand. But in the early 1990s, Lower Mainland crows amalgamated into a single roost along Burnaby's Still Creek near Willingdon and Lougheed.

Birders now estimate that when breeding season ends it is the preferred roost for as many as 35,000 crows nightly. I find some reason for optimism in this. If my baby birds can already swoop, perhaps soon they'll be old enough to commute.

The North Western crows seem larger than the ones I remembered crowing up -- I mean growing up -- in the Prairies. (Of course, on the Prairies where there's more space, I can't recall ever having been so up-close and personal with crows.) But, Cannings says, the North Westerns are smaller and slightly different from the more common variety. Ours have adapted to feed in the inter-tidal zones.

The North Westerns also have even more raggedy voices than their cousins. (I figure it's because they've cawed themselves hoarse. But I have no expert to back me on that.)

Having failed to get help with getting rid of them, I asked Cannings if there's a way to make friends with crows. It appears not. They prefer the company of crows, which may again be a sign of their superior intelligence.
But Cannings suggested I try to spend more time with them especially in the evenings after they've eaten their fill for the day. That's crow happy hour.

It's when Cannings first started observing the games crows play, while he was still an undergraduate at UBC. One would hang upside down on a willow branch. Others would come, knock the crow off and take its place.

They would do aerial feats, barrel rolls and the like. They'd drop empty shells that others would swoop and catch before they hit the ground.

It's why he and many others are so concerned about the crows on the other side of the Rockies. Crows are among the most susceptible species to West Nile virus and they're dying in record numbers.

A friend of Cannings in Oklahoma had been working on a long-term study of crows. She had tagged and knew virtually every crow in her area. Between 2002 and 2003, West Nile killed them all.

I take no glee in that. As much as I dislike my crows, I don't wish them dead. Only quieter and more urbane.