A rather macabre mystery is unfolding in Canada after dozens of dead crows were discovered along the path of a public park. According to a local media report, the weird case came to light earlier this week when people visiting the Central Valley Greenway in the city of Burnaby noticed that there were an unsettling number of downed birds littering the area. While initially seeing one dead crow as he walked through the park did not seem particularly odd to resident Paul Cipywnyk, his perspective quickly changed as the number of bodies increased dramatically.
"There was a second one, and a third one, a fourth one, a fifth one," he recalled, "that’s when I was kind of like, ‘oh, my goodness, what’s going on here?’" Adding an even spookier element to his experience, Cipywnyk said, was that there also happened to be several still-living crows looking down upon the nightmarish scene from a nearby tree. The birds, he said, "were very quiet," which he found to be unusual since "they are very social birds" and that " if crows see a dead crow they tend to be very concerned—they tend to be making a lot of ruckus and wondering what’s going on."
In this instance, however the birds were silent and it was Cipywnyk who was scratching his head as he mused that "I don’t know what was going on there." His mystification was echoed by another resident, Robert Alstead, who also spotted several dead crows during a bike ride at the greenway over the weekend. Perplexed by the strange scene, the witness actually stopped in his tracks and began examining the area which he soon realized was practically covered with the downed birds in clusters of two or three.
All told, Alstead guessed that there were at least three dozen dead crows along the path with probably many more hidden from view in the bushes. As for what could have caused the puzzling case, which has been dubbed a literal 'murder mystery,' there has been no official word of any investigation by either the city of Burnaby nor a pair of British Columbian wildlife departments which were made aware of the situation at the Central Valley Greenway. That said, Cipywnyk speculated that the crows could have been killed by some kind of virus as happened in a similar instance in another part of Canada earlier this year.