As far as I can tell there are two good reasons for my sister-in-law to be eternally frustrated with Vancouver. The first and most obvious of these is my brother, who is (again) in town for a few days, and not at home with his wife. We played with his new digital video camera last night and then watched the latest, greatest, unanimously-pathetic reality-tv offering from Fox, “My Big Fat Obnoxious Finance.” Derek ate too many tacos, though he would claim otherwise.

The second reason Shanney would have to hate this city, or so Derek tells me, is a mortal fear of birds.

I was walking home from the skytrain station yesterday, and my path lead me down a well traveled paved alley. One side of the alley was lined the usual array of houses, boxed homes set on the sloping incline of a hill and towering above the pavement with a smirk — but the other was fenced by a block-long grove of ill-kept tree-land, dry shrubbery guarded by leafless gnarled branches. I make the trip almost daily — most usually without incident or concern. It is “my walk” and it’s become that tramping daily plod towards home where the brain lets all the excess blah drain into semi-natureness.

But yesterday, shrouded in what can only be called a swarm, I encountered a very large gang of squaking crows. The sky was peppered with the birds, the trees heavy with branches each holding a dozen or more, their talons dug into the soft wood. The swooped and flew high, arriving, surveying, calling together in a deafening roar of white-noised screams. I crept along the edge of the dark forest avoiding the thousands of birds yelling at me from the trees. Yes, thousands. I was nothing to them, most fortunately.

Very eerie. Indeed. And later, when Derek and I wandered over to the mall to take pictures and video of the Burnaby cityscape from atop the Sears, they were all gone.