Morning Ride with Commuting Crows

There we were, leaning against our camper van in the alley behind our new home. We took a breath and sighed! Wow. Finally, the beautiful wife and I had become Vancouver residents.

Predictably we spent that first day monotonously humping all our stuff into the apartment. Trundling across the rippled concrete parkade, wait for the elevator, go up the elevator, roll down the corridor, drop off the boxes, roll back down the corridor, wait for the elevator, etc., etc. Thankfully we had no furniture at this point, having toured in an RV for a year. But what we did have was an awesome uninterrupted view of the mountains.

In due course, I required a ‘medicinal’ beer, or two, for my aching back. You understand! So we went for our first neighbourhood walkabout. We chose this end of the city because it is walkable. Having come from a small market town in the UK, we were used to getting what we needed locally, be it beer, beef, or a bank. On our walk that first dusky evening, hand in hand, we were properly excited about our new city, our new life.

Just a few blocks away, we saw something that bemused us and then, to be honest, scared us a bit. Welcome to the city!

Multiple lines of crows heading East darkened the sky. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. It was like the speeder scene in Star Wars Attack of the Clones. The one where Anakin and Obi-Wan are chasing an assassin in their airborne cars over Coruscant, around solid bands of traffic in the sky. Even in a galaxy far, far away, car traffic causes massive congestion, eh! Well, the sight of all these specimens was similar. What’s happening, we thought, is a Tsunami coming? No one else was paying ANY attention to this spectacle, so probably no impending natural disaster then? There wasn’t. We found the beer store, and life was good again.

Turns out the beasties roost further inland. Every night they all commute home together! Sometimes scores of them fly past our apartment windows of an evening. Every time it happens, it’s still a genuinely brilliant sight. But what’s not been repeated was the bizarre sight of hundreds of these creatures flying AROUND fog.

Even with blurry morning vision, I could see it was a gloomy one. It’s an 11km bicycle commute to my workshop on the other side of the harbour. Thankfully by the time I got out on my bicycle, the ‘pea soup’ wasn’t loitering on the road I wanted to use. It seemed to have retreated to hang closer to the water. There was, though, an awful LOT of crows zooming low directly overhead, right at me. This was creepy. So naturally, I stopped to watch these squadrons of cawing black blurs as they came in from the East. For as far as I could see.

My nose had gotten cold, so I resumed my peddle to work. Just a couple of kilometres later, I started climbing the bridgehead, where the route quickly turns South around a clump of bare trees. Clearing this naked grove revealed to me that these airborne commuters were flapping over the bridge too. The fog stopped abruptly here like it was held back by this iron structure spanning the inlet. I had never seen a ‘wall’ of suspended condensation up close before. Very cool. Were the birds actually avoiding this Ground Cloud parked over the harbour? They were, and this was really clear once I had gotten to the highest point of my route where I turn West.

From this vantage, I could see what the noisy mob were avoiding was only over the water. Where it stopped was as vertical as any of the towers it was sidling up to. Straight up for maybe 30 stories or more. Downtown Vancouver was clear, and the sky blue. It was like a Borg Cube made of droplets had landed on the harbour. It was that defined.

These gravity-defying feathered reptiles were coming in from the South East where they roost. They met the block of vapour at a corner as a long, wide, scrappy formation that then split gracefully into two dark ribbons. One banking to the North where I had come from and the other West towards downtown and Stanley Park. It was elegant and reminded me of how cyclists instinctively navigate around each other when they need to.

From this point, I continued my bicycle commute, out of sight of the harbour and the parade of ride companions.

That was the most fabulous bird-based sight I have ever seen on a bicycle commute. The most bizarre bird-based sight I ever saw was the time I observed a Seagull take down a Pigeon IN FLIGHT. He crashed it into the ground and then got mugged by another Gull. The victim escapes and gets chased round and round a building by a whole throng of these predators. All, I assume, with the scent of bird blood in their collective nostrils.

This story illustrates one of the many pleasures I experience while commuting by bicycle. I get the chance to pause and witness nature’s spectacles as they are presented to me. Something I don't think I ever experienced in my car. Not like this. I was always too consumed by watching the vehicle’s back end ahead as we all plod along in lines of choking congestion to the next red light!