If You Think You Can Hold a Grudge, Consider the Crow If You Think You Can Hold a Grudge, Consider the Crow
The New York Times
The brainy birds carry big chips on their shoulders, scientists say. And some people who become subjects of their ire may be victims of mistaken identity.
Over and over, the crows attacked Lisa Joyce as she ran screaming down a Vancouver street.
They dive bombed, landing on her head and taking off again eight times by Ms. Joyce’s count. With hundreds of people gathered outdoors to watch fireworks that July evening, Ms. Joyce wondered why she had been singled out.
“I’m not a fraidy-cat, I’m not generally nervous of wildlife,” said Ms. Joyce, whose crow encounters grew so frequent this past summer that she changed her commute to work to avoid the birds.
“But it was so relentless,” she said, “and quite terrifying.”
Ms. Joyce is far from alone in fearing the wrath of the crow. CrowTrax, a website started eight years ago by Jim O’Leary, a Vancouver resident, has since received more than 8,000 reports of crow attacks in the leafy city, where crows are relatively abundant. And such encounters stretch well beyond the Pacific Northwest.
A Los Angeles resident, Neil Dave, described crows attacking his house, slamming their beaks against his glass door to the point where he was afraid it would shatter. Jim Ru, an artist in Brunswick, Maine, said crows destroyed the wiper blades of dozens of cars in the parking lot of his senior living apartment complex. Nothing seemed to dissuade them.
