I’m gonna tell a tale now about boids. Smaht boids.
Why can’t I ever find that Far Side comic online? You know, the one where the police are gathered around Big Bird’s lifeless body and the detective is examining the bullets on the floor and he says “Bird shot. Big bird shot.”
I wish I could find it because it’s funny.
I think this story is funny too, though when it happened to me I wasn’t really laughing. Several years ago, as I was leaving the house and going to catch my bus one summer morning, I noticed 3 crows in my general area. One of them was sitting on the neighbour’s lawn, and the other two were perched on streetlights across the street. And these 3 boids were large, even for crows.
They were talking amongst themselves. I don’t know what they were saying because I don’t speak Crow. Anyhoo, the one on the lawn looked at me and let out a few LOUD squawks. Feeling in a good mood and a tad rambunctious for a weekday morning, I squawked right back at him. Now for those of you who don’t know me, I have quite a malleable voice. I’m very good at impressions, and this includes the ability to sound pretty damn close to the way a squawking crow sounds.
And I don’t know what I said to that bird… but he must have gotten something fucking PISSED off. He took to the air, squawking all the while at his compatriots. I thought nothing of it, because that’s kind of what crows do. But then, with all three squawking loudly, they began to take turns at dive-bombing me.
One of them flew ahead to a streetlight in front of where I was walking, and he swooped down fast aimed directly at my face. He stopped short of hitting me about 12 inches away and flew back up to the streetlight behind me.
“What the fuck?” I thought.
Then, a second crow out of those three did the exact same thing to me. He got to that same streetlight, swooped down fast a foot in front of my head, and took off behind me.
Then the third one did it. Then the first one did it again. I don’t know just how many iterations of this pattern they pulled off, but after the third time it happened I was seriously freaked out. These fucking huge-ass birds had obviously made some spur-of-the-moment plans to fuck my shit up. And they succeeded. That’s teamwork.
I quickened my pace, but being aware that these animals were trying to show me how displeased they were with my behaviour toward them, I took a gamble on a psychological bluff. I just tried to look calm and tried to ignore them.
It worked, and they got tired of fucking with my head. But they kept squawking at me. I didn’t look back, but I heard them until I turned the corner 5 houses down.
I’m pretty sure that had they wanted to injure me, they would have done so on the first attempt…. and they would have swooped me all at once.
So…
I learned something that day. Don’t fuck with crows. They’re damn smart and they don’t like putting up with trash talk. And since their talons and beaks can do some pretty nasty damage to our soft and meaty skin, I think we best stick to leaving them alone for the most part.