Over and over, the crows attacked Lisa Joyce as she ran screaming down a street in Vancouver, Canada. They dive-bombed, landing on her head and taking off again eight times by Joyce’s count. With hundreds of people gathered outdoors to watch fireworks that July evening, Joyce wondered why she had been singled out.
“I’m not a fraidy-cat; I’m not generally nervous of wildlife,” said 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.” 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 8000 reports of crow attacks in the leafy city where crows are relatively abundant. And such encounters stretch well beyond the Pacific Northwest..