Carrying a grudge ... to the max

A murder of crows, which flock, en masse, every evening from across Greater Vancouver to a five-block section of Still Creek, Burnaby, British Columbia. Here they enjoy safety in numbers over the evening and night.

Yours truly has a soft spot for crows and their even smarter cousins, the ravens, who seem to be the calmer of the two, is a species who reign supreme as being noisy, somewhat obnoxious and aware to a fault and ... able to carry a grudge until the end of time. 

Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.

They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.

Attacks by aggrieved crows can become the stuff of horror films, with lives being seemingly transformed into the Hitchcockian nightmare of “The Birds.”

Channeling Hitchcock ...

Gene Carter, a computer specialist in Seattle, was followed by crows that lurked outside his windows for the better part of a year.

“The crows would stare at me in the kitchen,” he said in an interview. “If I got up and moved around the house, they would find any place where they could perch and scream at me. If I walked out to my car they would dive bomb me. They would get within an inch of my head.”

Mr. Carter knows precisely what set off the attacks. One day in his backyard, he saw crows encroaching on a robin’s nest and launched a rake into the air.

But he never imagined that the crows’ revenge would last so long. The mob learned to identify the bus he took on his way home from work, Mr. Carter said. “They were waiting for me at the bus stop every single day,” he said. “My house was three or four blocks away and they would dive bomb me all the way home.”

The harassment stopped only when Mr. Carter moved.

The moral of the story seems to be ... don't piss off crows. :)