By Jim Hagarty
2005
There might be a human being here and there with whom I do not have a perfect relationship. Being the cantankerous editor of a meddlesome little newspaper has a way of attracting the ire of those on the receiving end of the barbs.
But with all the members of the non-human world, I usually have no issue (except, perhaps, for this harmless dog on my old paper route who “hounded” me mercilessly each time I made a delivery). I say “usually”, because I am making an exception for the family of crows that have lived in the trees in my backyard on Albert Street for many years now. They have got to be, without doubt, the most annoying creatures for miles around – at least, around my neighbourhood. Of course, they caw, caw, caw from morning to night, and on garbage collection day, if we put out a can with no lid, they’ll sit in there and dine like they had lucked onto the best little crow café this side of the Rio Grande, once in a while looking out over the edge to make sure the landlord isn’t preparing an eviction notice. And in the years when we had cats, they were not shy about flying low and scaring the whiskers off them just for fun, I suspect.
But none of these complaints comprise the real issue I have with these birds of flight left over from the age of the dinosaurs. (It is believed by some scientists that they are not only left over, but are actual dinosaurs.) What really has my blood gurgling at about 450 degrees is the flight path they take daily from spring to fall around our home. Specifically, they fly from behind my house, then follow a sidewalk straight south to the driveway where my small blue car sits. With timing and accuracy that would surely be the envy of the Star Wars system they’re setting up in the U.S. to shoot down all those enemy rockets that have been flying in over Canada lately, crow after crow drops a white payload, not on the sidewalk, driveway or house near my car, but directly onto my vehicle. The family car sitting right next to it is left unscathed. My car only, is the target.
And not just this one. The two cars I owned before this one and which I parked in the same spot, were similarly decorated day after day. Especially the candy apple red one that often took on the appearance of one of those “two-tone” cars from the ’50s with their bodies one colour and their roofs white – in my case, birdcrap white. I don’t know whether or not zoologists claim crows are colour blind, but I’m willing to testify in a Supreme Court hearing that they can see candy-apple red perfectly well.
The contents of crow crap are destructive to the paint job on a car, and so this mess cannot be left to perform its corrosive wonders. Nevertheless, days pass sometimes before I can get to doing the requisite scrub-down and during those periods, I must suffer the indignity of sitting at traffic lights and feeling the stares of the owners of the immaculate SUVs beside me, looking down on me and the crow toilet that my vehicle has become.
Wednesday morning, before work, I could take it no more and dashed out to clean the darned doodoo off. Without a word of a lie (OK, I’m an exaggerating Irishman, so take this figure and divide by four) there must have been 200 spots on my car that had been hit. Mirrors, windshields, roof, trunk, hood, headlights. For obvious reasons, my windows will stay up all summer.
Out in western Canada, where they’re called ravens, the crows grow even bigger. I saw one the size of a small child one day, strolling across the parking lot of an Alberta fast-food restaurant. I hightailed it out of there, before he “spotted” me and my bucket of bolts.
Something has to be done. Laws. Helicopter gunships. Star Wars.
Something.
