Jul 21, 2018
Counting crows: Vancouver college maps thousands of attacks
It was a crow fiercely protecting its nest – and repeated complaints of it dive-bombing and swooping – that prompted the idea.
“Just about every day someone would come in and say: ‘I got smacked in the back of the head,’ or ‘Mary got smacked in the back of the head,’” said Jim O’Leary, a teacher at Langara College in Vancouver, Canada.
“I was thinking to myself: I know crows are smart but we’re pretty smart too. Isn’t there something that I can do about this?”
The result was CrowTrax, an online tool that since 2016 has documented about 2,500 crow attacks in the Metro Vancouver region, nearby Victoria and around the world.
