We Absolutely Need To Talk About This Crow In Canada That Stole A Knife From A Crime Scene
His name is Canuck, and he is an evil genius.
It all started with a tweet:
Crow takes off with knife from crime scene in Vancouver https://t.co/dwJRLJF6aN pic.twitter.com/dapLVQa5Rp
— CBC News (@CBCNews) May 26, 2016
Right off the bat, you know this is going to be an amazing story, and not because of the easy “murder of crows” pun potential your dad will email you this article about three weeks from now. For one, it’s about crows being bad. Birds are awful, and crows are the worst of all the birds, so any story that confirms my prejudices about crows being horrendous scraps of flying nightmares is one that I naturally respond to.
It’s also in Canada, a country I am led to understand is entirely given over to the hijinks of mischievous woodland creatures. In Canada, crows are the worst criminals there are, or maybe some form of secret society of unknown but sinister intent. The natural implication of the headline is that the crow in question stole the crime-scene knife to cover up an even worse crow-crime. I hope you like the phrase “crow-crimes”, because you’re about to read it a lot.
The article that Tweet links to starts like this: “Canuck the crow, Vancouver’s most notorious bird, is being accused of flying away with a knife from a crime scene.”
Which. Okay. First off, this crow has a name. Its name is ‘Canuck’, which is the most stereotypically Canadian thing to name something you could possibly envisage, so we’re off to a great start already.
Second, Canuck is regarded by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as “Vancouver’s most notorious bird”, which raises all sorts of questions. Is there more than one “notorious bird” in Vancouver? Does Vancouver keep a record of all the birds that torment the city, like Batman villains? Are they ranked? Does Canuck have to fight against other reprobate birds to keep the top spot? Who is his main rival? Is it a swan? It’s a swan, isn’t it. Fucking swans.
Fuck you too, SWAN.
The story goes on to recount how police shot and arrested a man wielding a knife in the street near a burning car. That is very not-fun and devoid of crowtimes, but all involved are apparently fine, so don’t worry about it.
Then Canuck makes his appearance.
“Vancouver Courier reporter Mike Howell said he saw the bird — which had a red tag on its leg as does Canuck — swoop in and pick up an object from inside an area cordoned off by police tape. ‘It was really strange. In my 20-plus years reporting from crime scenes, I’ve never seen anything like that crow trying to take a knife.'” No shit, Mike. You’d know that crows are constantly trying to ruin police investigations by stealing weapons from crime scenes if you got out from behind your desk once in a while and worked the old shoe-leather for a change, Mike. It’s Journalism 101, you hack. (Mike is probably very good at his job and also a nice person, please don’t find him on the internet and abuse him — ed.)
We then learn that police eventually recovered the knife after chasing Canuck for a while, before imparting this horrifying image:
That is not a photo. That is the cover of a Stephen King novel where a chaos god made up of millions of seething, bristling crows who speak in one deafening voice claws its way out of a rupture in the earth in western Iowa and ends up swallowing the sun.
By the way, in case you were wondering what kind of deadbeat cop was too busy taking a photo of a crow with a crime-scene knife in its beak to actually try and get the knife back, don’t worry — that photo up top is from an entirely separate incident of Canuck carrying a fucking knife around like he’s Crocodile Dundee.
HOW MANY KNIVES DOES THIS BIRD HAVE. (Source.)
As it turns out, Canuck is a minor Canadian celebrity –he was interviewed on the news last year after attacking a cyclist, and sometimes catches Vancouver’s SkyTrain around town without paying for a ticket like the inconsiderate freeloader he is. You have wings, Canuck! You have wings and the rest of us pay taxes. Turn your life around.
He even has his own Facebook page. It mainly consists of hundreds on hundreds of close-up photos of his face, but it also has fan-art, some truly unsettling shots of his “inner eyelid”, which is apparently a thing that all crows have that makes them look like Bran Stark when he’s warging, and what appears to be the cover of his debut rap album.
This is the closest thing Vancouver has to Drake. (Source.)
I don’t know how this story ends. I don’t know if Canuck gets it together one day, or if he continues to rob crime scenes and stand atop burning cars until he either runs Vancouver with an iron beak or crashes and burns.
But I will be watching, Canuck. I cannot look away. Godspeed, you garbage bird.