Picture this: you're walking down a sidewalk in Vancouver, minding your own business, sipping your coffee, and then something smacks you in the back of the head. No warning, no noise; just a straight hit from above. Welcome to crow attack season, a very real, very weird annual event in Canada's Vancouver.
Every spring, roughly April to July, crows all over Metro Vancouver transform into little fighter jets. They swoop. They scratch. Sometimes they draw blood. It’s so predictable on the calendar that a local college instructor has even built an actual live map so people can check which streets to avoid before they leave the house. This CBC News report says the tool, called CrowTrax, was developed by Jim O’Leary, a geographic information systems instructor at Langara College, and fellow instructor Rick Davidson.
Meet CrowTrax, the app tracking the angry birds
CrowTrax is exactly what it sounds like: a crowdsourced map where anyone who gets divebombed can drop a pin and describe what happened. Since its launch in 2016, the map has received thousands of reports. According to this piece from Vancouver Is Awesome, O’Leary now receives about 1,500 reports of “human-crow interaction” every year, with the biggest hotspots being downtown Vancouver and the West End, areas with narrow sidewalks, leafy trees, and lots of restaurant food scraps that crows have grown to love.
