Why are birds attacking people in Vancouver? Science gives us a map!

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When I was a kid, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds scared the life out of me. I knew Hitchcock was prescient!

Ravens are thugs. :worried:

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According to a later film audiences laughed when The Birds was first released.

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I think that would’ve made the movie less scary and more viewable for my six-year-old self (watching it on T.V).

I was a wuss.

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Why? Because crows are dicks. They’re the wasp of the bird world.

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Well, I love High Anxiety just for the pigeon scene alone.

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Psssh; I also saw The Birds when I was 6 years old, and I still give pigeons the side-eye to this very day.

But then again, that could just be because they are basically rats with wings…

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It doesn’t pay to ignore a sending from the Morrígan… looks like she’s pointing at Stanley Park.

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Smugness? I lived in Vancouver for years. They changed the license plates to say “Best Place on Earth” when I lived there. Enough said.

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Attacking just caws something ruffled their feathers? Hope it’s not escalated to murder?

Sorry :smirk:

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Beak quiet, you.

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why? because people suck. Seems to be reason enough, no?

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For instance, it is already showing that a large number of the attacks happen in the West End and downtown of Vancouver, which makes sense, he says, because crows love to be around human food, and those areas have lots of restaurants and leafy trees.

Maybe they don’t like the local cuisine.

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I shall caw it a day and you shall hear from me nevermore…

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I swear the following is absolutely true. I saw The Birds for the first time as a teenager. Within one or two days:

  1. a bird flew into our living room picture window.
  2. a bird flew into a car I was driving (as a learner) through an open window. Somehow I didn’t crash.
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We have a crow problem.

I remember reading Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief years ago. One of the moments where I was like “This really does feel like Vancouver” was Coupland’s description of the huge crow highway that appears every evening as birds fly from the North Shore to roost around Burnaby Lake.

There’s… too many of them.

And every spring, when the damnable things create more of their noisy, insatiable spawn, they start dive bombing people at random. The journalists pick up the story, then they ask the ornithologists at the local Unis and shelters, who smugly say: “Oh, well if that person got attacked they must have done something bad to crows. Crows are highly intelligent, you know.”

Yes, as intelligent as most ornithologists. :expressionless:

I’d probably trust the crows before I’d trust a person claiming the dive-bombing was “random”. Most likely they did something evil to a crow without even noticing or caring about it. Crows track such people, and then tell each other about them.

If you harm a crow, don’t leave any witnesses.

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Thanks for assuming that we’re a city of lying animal abusers, Medievalist. I’ve come to expect nothing less from you. :smiley:

There’s something you should take away from that study: if two completely different people are wearing the same mask, from the crow’s perspective, they’re the same person. It doesn’t matter how tall they are, how they smell, whether they’re male or female, different voice, gait… whatever. So, from a literal bird’s eve view, two people wearing a red cap and a leather jacket are the indisputably same person. So I’d hardly call crow harassment ironclad evidence of animal abuse, as some like to.

I’ve never harmed a crow. I’ve never stolen their chicks nor can I remember doing so much as shouting at them. I may have shooed them away from something once or twice. But hey, feel free to call me a liar.

OR, maybe reassess how you’re applying the conclusions of one scientific study to day-to-day life.

tennis racket.