Springtime in my neck of the woods means means crow attack season. I know that these birds are normally just defending their nests and fledglings during the early spring but, for me it is a little more than that.
I have a tendency to move a lot, usually once a year. Not just from building to building within a city or town but generally I move from one city to another. Hell, I move so often that it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit assistance. So much so that I have to join new social media sites to mine for volunteers which reminds me, what are you doing 2 Sundays from now?
Anyway, it is 2013 and I move to this little town that could be best described as being like Charming from the TV series Sons of Anarchy. Hell, I wasn't settled in this new place a fews weeks before there was an execution in the parking lot across the street from place. Charming huh?
Back at that time I would walk 8 miles a day for exercise, nothing fancy, just my regular circuit around what served as the downtown core. That route had me walking through a fairly large, open air, bus loop full of people waiting for the city buses.
Right from the get go, my first stroll through this bus loop, I get attacked by this crow. I didn't think too much of it at the time but on my second, third and fourth lap around I started noticing a pattern as more crows join in the attacks. The moment I set foot in this huge bus loop, the crows start flying in to either scream at me, drop things on me and or dive at me so close that I can feel the breeze generated by their flapping wings. I recall this one time when this big, scraggly crow flew directly over me to drop this 6 inch long green PVC on me. He missed but not by much.
It was insane just how much these birds wanted to get me. So much so that strangers would comment to me as I walked by, asking me what I did to piss these crows off? Sometimes I would sit outside of the bus loop to see if the crows were attacking anybody else but they never seemed to. As soon as I set foot into the loop the crows would start flying in and my bizarre escorts would harass me until I was out.
Fast forward to my next new home in a completely different city, far from the Murder loop as I liked to call it. Right from my first daily walk in my new digs the local crows to this area pick up right where the Murder loop crows left off. Sometimes the little bastards would roost in the tree branches just off of my second floor balcony and stare at me in my living room while they screamed at me.
At a dinner with my daughter and her new man I describe my situation with the crows to them. They aren't buying it, think it is just some coincidence. To this I respond with "I'll prove it to you , I'll videotape the attacks and you can see for yourself. After dinner I made arrangements to borrow a GoPro from one of my sons and prepared to film the attacks the next morning.
With a GoPro strapped to my head I set out o do my morning walk. The following video details some of the better attacks over a 20 minute walk. In one of the attacks the crow appears to come out of the ground. Another one, the crow actually hits me in the back of the head making the camera jostle a bit.
Once again the music in the video is It's Your Life by Maniacal Rage