The Birds of Burnaby

I often take walks in the Mountain View Cemetery near my house in Vancouver. Opened in 1886, it comprises nearly 100 acres with nearly 145,000 souls put to rest. There is a Mason section, a Chinese section, a Jewish section, and large swaths devoted to veterans. The cemetery sometimes hosts concerts or plays in the cemetery. There are Celtic crosses, Russian Orthodox crosses, and Chinese script within feet of each other. When I go I see runners, dog walkers, Pokemon go-ers. At the cemetery’s highest point is a wonderful view of the Lions, the 5,000 foot North Shore peaks that look like tusks.

On several occasions when walking around dusk, I have noticed a procession of thousands of crows flying in straight line formation in a Northeasterly direction, some playing and dancing as they flew. I wondered where they were going, and continued my walk. One evening, back home I decided to Google it, to see if there was any local bird forums that might talk about where they go. To my surprise I found several Newspaper articles on this massive murder of crows.

I will admit crows are not my favorite birds, though I still admire them. They all too often remind me of us. They click and squabble, pick on and steal from the weak; and they are voracious consumers of trash. And yet they are also very beautiful birds that mate for life and tenderly care for their young. In July I found this out when a mating pair would routinely swoop and caw at me every time I left the house for about two weeks. When I was living in Bellingham, I remember seeing a fledged chick with bright blue eyes hobbling through our back alley to the raucous encouragement of her parents.

But it turns out that the crows I saw from the cemetery faithfully fly to a neighborhood in Burnaby, just east of Vancouver to roost for the evening. There are between 3-6 thousand of them, and every morning they disperse to forage and then return to their roost in Burnaby. It must certainly be a site to see them congregate, though I am not sure you would want to be directly below them.