Every day in Midtown at approximately 5:30 hundreds of crows gather in the trees directly above my parked car to get a clear vantage point of potential targets, one of which usually ends up being my car! Argh! It is from here that they shit their way around the city and do whatever else it is that crows do. So while my poor car is painted with a fresh coat of milky-white excrement, crows flock by the dozens and begin to fill the trees branch by branch until the trees have room for no more. At an early stage it usually looks something like this:
And before you know it there are too many to count and the sky is filled with crows coming in for a landing. While I sat waiting for the crows to arrive/ depart many people passed by and asked me about the crows and exactly what I was doing there; I must have looked out of place or something just sitting there with a camera. And one of the more humorous comments that I got came from a British guy. He said, “Do you speak crow?” I thought that it was kind of funny, especially with the British accent, but you probably would have had to be there… Yeah.
For whatever reason, the crows usually wait until it’s a bit darker before they make their impressive lift off for the next set of trees. So there I was just waiting to get my shot of the crows and meanwhile, the crows cawed by the hundreds, which is always something that draws people out of their homes and businesses in the neighborhood. It can get pretty loud. (It might be difficult to see how many crows there actually are up there but if you consider that there are no leaves in these trees right now and how many black dots you see, it’s kind of a lot.)
So finally, after waiting for nearly twenty minutes the crows were all cleared for take off. You always know when they are about to take off because they get really loud. After a good ten seconds of ear-splitting caws, camera focused in on subject and trigger finger set to shoot, I was ready but not for what followed.
Splatter. Splatter. Splatter. I thought to myself, “Oh, shit!” I mean, literally, that’s what was happening. They began to take off and release their ammunition. It started out kind of far away but I soon realized that trouble was coming my way and it was time for me to fly out of there myself. I ran in the direction of our house, which was naturally the flight path of the crows, and I could hear the sound of the bombs going off behind me. Splat. Splat. Splat. It wasn’t long before I felt something on my arm. I was hit.
In the end, I didn’t get the shot of all of the crows taking off in unison and my car and I became victims of target practice, but hey, it’s not the first time that something like this has happened, right? It’s 5:54 and I can hear the crows outside. It’s getting pretty loud so that means that I had better go and move my wood project out of the backyard!!! Bird crap and wet stain do not mix!
