A very strange crime scene played out in Vancouver, British Columbia, this week. It involved more than 20 police officers, a man accused of wielding a knife, and a crow seen stealing the knife.
According to local media reports, police responded Tuesday afternoon to a car that was on fire in a McDonald’s parking lot on the city’s east side. Once there, a police statement said, a man confronted officers with a knife, and they shot him. He was treated for gunshot and knife wounds that were not life threatening, according to the Vancouver Courier.
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So there was no murder, and there was no murder of crows. But there was one crow, and witnesses said it swooped down, used its claws to pick up the knife and then flew away. One of the officers on the scene “was forced to chase down” the bird, which dropped the knife a few feet later and also “tried to make off with a pair of eyeglasses in the lot and steal gear belonging to a television camera operator”, Courier reporter Mike Howell wrote.
Was this bird a crow-conspirator, trying to remove incriminating evidence?
Nope. A red plastic band around its left leg quickly identified it as east Vancouver’s most famous crow, Canuck. Canuck has a Facebook page devoted to him that had more than 23,000 followers as of Sunday, as well as starring roles in a few YouTube videos. The man who runs the Canuck and I Facebook page, Shawn Bergman, said the bird fell out of its nest as a chick and was rescued and rehabilitated by his landlord’s son. That was in May 2015.
Two months later, Bergman said, Canuck was released into the urban wild. But “for some reason”, Bergman said, “he just imprinted me as a best friend”. People refer to Canuck as a he, though his gender is not known; Bergman said he is going to send feathers to a DNA lab to settle the matter.