We interrupt our regular programming to bring you a special commemorative post. Just a year ago this week, we sold our long-time home and had our offer accepted on the new-to-us Yellow House -- not far from our old place, as the crow flies. In the first drive-by of our new neighbourhood, we spotted a funky little blue house at the end of our block.
This tiny rental house proudly proclaims itself as "Crow Haven" and is distinguished by the hand-made crow motifs that abound on its fences and exterior walls.
Within a week of finally moving here last July, we realized what had inspired the unknown artist of Crow Haven. Moving just five blocks from our old home, we'd landed squarely in new territory:-- beneath the locally famous Flight Path of the Northwestern Crows. Every morning just before dawn, a gazillion Corvus caurinus leave their community roost in suburban Burnaby and head less than 10 miles west to the beaches of Vancouver. Every evening just before dusk, they return home en masse from their day at the beach.
"Gazillion" here translates as somewhere between 17,000 and 25,000 -- we've seen at most 2000 at once in our segment of the flight path. Even that makes for an awesome sight, nicely captured in this newspaper photo taken about 10 blocks northeast of us -- and also, less dramatically, in this scene from our front porch.
The daily migration is as much a mystery to local naturalists as it is to us, and the crows' routes and groupings are variable and unpredictable. Sometimes they'll come in tidy groups of 1-2 dozen; sometimes a couple hundred will fly in a mob north or south of our house, or directly overhead. Often, morning or evening, a bunch will linger for a while on the treetops in the block south of us. It's become a part of our routine to watch for them and enjoy what JT has called their acrowbatics.
Bring up the subject of urban crows in Vancouver, and you'll get one of two responses: (1) "Did you see the movie The Birds?"; or (2) "You either love 'em or hate 'em, and I...(fill in the blank)...them." We've been intrigued by them since the time years ago when young crows learned to fly in our old backyard -- but we'd just as soon witness them on high, rather than right on the back porch:-- this youngster lingered for half an hour one September afternoon.
Curiously, the commuter traffic has changed noticeably with the spring equinox. The thousands who are serious about Carrying On With Being Crows have ceased the daily migration and are finding nesting sites along Vancouver streets. It looks like 2-3 nests are under construction in our neighbourhood, including one just above our backyard. If you're intrigued by these beachcombing corvids, you can read more here and here.
With the heartening sight of nest-building crows with twigs in their beaks, we salute our new neighbourhood and celebrate our first spring in The Yellow House.
This is so wonderful! Very interesting! In a way, I'm reminded of my father's poem about the sparrows in his neighborhood (Yorkville, the Upper East Side of Manhattan) in the early 1900s. He called them The Larks of the City Streets.
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