Canuck the Crow, our new ambassador

By Sharon McInnes

How does a wild crow come to be the unofficial ambassador of Vancouver? What does it say about Vancouverites that they chose a crow over a man who’s devoted much of his life to Parkinson’s research? Or to environmental justice? According to a tweet by Justin McElroy, CBC Vancouver’s municipal affairs reporter who dreamt up the contest, having Canuck in the poll was a lark. Here’s his tweet:

The Five Stages of Grief
DENIAL: The crow will never win so let’s put him in.
ANGER: The crow is doing too well, and it’s sullying the game.
BARGAINING: The crow will surely lose to Trevor Linden.
DEPRESSION: The crow will win and I’m never doing a bracket again.
ACCEPTANCE: Vancouver is a smoggy unaffordable hellscape, let the people have their fleeting moment of joy.

Well, many of us are indeed joyous – although not everyone, based on a few random comments on the Canuck & I Facebook page.

The Canuck Story

In case you’re one of the few that hasn’t yet heard the story, Canuck the crow had an unusual beginning. As a baby, he fell from the nest and was rescued. On the day of his release, Shawn Bergman, who’d always been fascinated by crows and who was the tenant of the man who’d nursed Canuck to health, showed up for the release. Canuck jumped onto his arm, as if they were already old buds. They’ve been inseparable ever since.

 

I assume all went well until the day Canuck decided to examine the reflective strip on the backpack of a boy on a bicycle. The boy kind of freaked out, and someone caught the interaction on video. The media got involved. One headline read, “Crow Attacks Cyclist.” The scathing comments under the article prompted Shawn to create the Canuck & I Facebook page to try to explain that Canuck was just checking out the backpack and to educate people about crows. It worked. Canuck now has over 100,000 Facebook fans from Canada, the USA, Europe, Australia, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and Antarctica. Shawn posts photos pretty much every day and within twenty minutes there can be hundreds of comments.

As Sheila Haniszewska, one of his “Top Fans” says, “He has made people much more appreciative of crows. So many people have written that they didn’t like crows before and now they love them.” Indeed.

Shenanigans

Then one day Canuck grabbed a knife at a crime scene at Cassiar and Hastings. (Flying away with evidence is bad form; luckily, no criminal charges were filed.) Media around the world picked up the story. Snoop Dog tweeted about it. Canuck became an international star overnight.

 

In Sheila’s words, “He is powerful medicine. And in difficult times, for so many people everywhere, he provides laughter and a shining example of spunkiness and cheekiness. He’s a rascal … and who doesn’t love a rascal!”

Then there’s the “stealing” food at MacDonald’s caper, which the customers handled pretty well, I thought. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45t6KAjCs4Y&feature=youtu.be

And the sneaking onto Skytrain stunt. But he seems to have learned his lesson. (Corvids are, after all, among the smartest birds in the world.)

 

Plus there was the stealing someone’s pipe in Whistler escapade. And the dive-bombing the letter-carrier gambit, which resulted in Canada Post refusing to deliver to that block during nesting season. (Wiser heads prevailed: Shawn and the mail-carrier worked it out without the help of the corporation.)

 

 

Love & Loss

But Canuck’s story isn’t all shenanigans. This June, when Canuck and his mate, Cassiar, gave birth to babies, Canuck fans around the world were thrilled.

 

Unfortunately, their young didn’t survive the first year. There was an outpouring of grief from fans and heartfelt condolences for Shawn, who wrote, “To be blunt, I’m devastated.” Of course.

It’s not hard to see why Canuck’s story is so compelling. BC poet Fiona Tinwei Lam even wrote a poem about him, Ode to a Crow, for Migration Songs, a chapbook unveiled at the Vancouver International Festival of Birds recently. (You can get a copy here: https://lindacrosfield.com/nibpublishing/migration-songs/)

But really, winning the unofficial ambassador of Vancouver title against people like David Suzuki and Micheal J. Fox? It’s not hard for me to understand a crow winning over Trevor Linden or Seth Rogen or Ryan Reynolds or other pop culture artists who come and go – but winning over people who’ve devoted much of their lives to social justice or medical research? It can boggle the mind.

I have to admit that when it came down to the  wire, Canuck versus Michael J. Fox, a man I admire very much, I felt a tinge of guilt at voting for the scrappy East Van crow whose never raised a cent for medical research, as far as I know. But I voted for Canuck anyway. He’d captured my imagination, made me laugh, touched something in me that all the good works in the world couldn’t touch.

For me, Canuck represents freedom and connection at the same time. He spends his night roosting with the thousands of crows at Still Creek in Burnaby and his days hanging out with Shawn, his human bud – just because he wants to. How cool is that? And how unusual.

The Mystery

It’s one thing to be beloved by the pet dog you feed and shelter and quite another to be adopted by a wild animal. I read a suggestion somewhere that Canuck had imprinted on Shawn. But why didn’t he imprint with the neighbour who rescued and raised him? Shawn met Canuck after he he’d been nursed back to health by other people. So I don’t buy the imprinting scenario. I prefer to believe what many of his fans seem to believe: that Canuck chose Shawn for reasons that we will never understand. That it’s a mystery. We don’t know what crows see or feel when they look at us. Did Canuck sense something in Shawn – his lifelong love of crows? His pain? (Shawn speaks openly of his unhappiness before meeting Canuck.) Do crows have the capacity for empathy?

Sure, the myth that crows hold funerals for their dead has been disproven. Scientists now know that the gathering of crows around their dead is not actually a mourning ritual but a way to get information about risk. How did this crow die? Was he killed? If so, is the perpetrator still around? If so, let’s identify him and tell all our friends! See https://kcts9.org/programs/in-close/science/do-crows-mourn and https://www.livescience.com/53283-why-crows-hold-funerals.html

So maybe those funerals aren’t quite the same as human funerals, maybe they have a more practical primary purpose than the simple sharing of grief, but the story of Canuck makes me wonder: couldn’t it be both?

We know crows are intelligent: they remember faces, use tools, solve complex problems using insight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fiAoqwsc9g. Maybe they also have emotional intelligence? Many dog owners talk about their dogs’ ability to sense people’s moods. Maybe Canuck is smart in ways that are different from how we typically measure intelligence?

In any event, I agree with Sheila, who says, “He’s a touch of the wilderness and a reconnection to our ancient roots as hunter-gatherers when we lived in balance with nature and listened to her messages.”

For me, the story of Canuck is about the mystery of the profound human-animal connection, one most of us living in urban centres have lost. Canuck and Shawn are reminding us that we’re connected in ways we may not understand, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

Plus, really, who can resist that handsome face?

 

For a pick-me-up any day, check out this short video, which has been viewed over a million times. https://thetyee.ca/Video/2017/07/31/East-Van-Crow-Canuck-and-I/

Many thanks to Shawn Bergman for sharing Canuck with all of us. And for the photos!