How crows became a calling for one Vancouver man

Vancouver-area bird scientist Dr. Robert Butler’s fascination with crows started when he was about fifteen years old, when he rescued a crow with a deformed foot. By that point he was already interested in the natural world and in observing birds, and he soon decided he wanted to make it his life.

However, when Butler decided to do his master’s research on crows, he recalled how another graduate student was surprised and asked why he didn’t want to study puffins or something more interesting. 

“Back in the ’70s and at that time, you know, the people were starting to look at some of the other species around British Columbia, particularly the sea birds, which were of great interest to a lot of people,” says Butler.

At that time, though some rudimentary research had been conducted on Northwestern crows on where they nested, Butler says not much was known about more detailed habits like their breeding biology or behaviour — and there wasn’t much interest. But the personal experience with his pet crow had shown him how clever and intelligent they could be.

“There was all this mythology about them, I thought, this doesn't really add up. Even some of the scientists were saying the same things, you know, these were evil, nasty crows. They had all kinds of derogatory things to say about them,” he said.

So he decided to find out more.

What it added up to was a “lifetime of corvid obsession,” as a new documentary by Vancouver filmmaker Mike McKinlay describes it. Society of Crows: The Art and Practice of Dr. Rob Butler, released on Knowledge Network this winter, zeroes in not only on Butler’s fascination with crows but on his life as an award-winning researcher, author and artist.

Shot in black and white at a dreamy slow pace, the film has no narration and is instead framed by MacKinlay’s careful cinematography, told through interview clips featuring Butler’s own warm, gentle words.

“Rob was a feeling. He wasn't necessarily like, this exact certain written story that I needed to capture, he was just a feeling. And I wanted to go into that feeling, into that world of his and see what I came up with,” says McKinlay, who met Butler years ago when he was a young professional skateboarder working on a documentary about crows. 

“I was working with this woman, Robyn Worchester who's one of the ecologists for Stanley Park..I was just getting to know people in Vancouver, and the people that were doing wild stuff, and she was like, ‘Oh, you got to talk to Rob Butler. He is the crow guy.’” The two soon became close friends and worked with the Pacific WildLife Foundation together, which Butler co-founded in 2003.

The film, which recently won an Outstanding Excellence Award at the Nature Without Borders Film Festival, explores Butler’s early crow research conducted on Mitlenatch Island, a small rocky island in the Strait of Georgia off the coast of Vancouver Island near Black Creek. A nature reserve only accessible by boat, it’s a nesting colony for thousands of seabirds and other wildlife including Glaucous-winged Gulls, Pelagic Cormorants, Black Oystercatchers, river otters and harbour seals.

The scenes from this time illustrate an idyllic, woolly, bygone era of coastal scientific research in the 1970s. Hired by BC Parks as park naturalists, Butler spent three years holed up in a cedar-shingled shack as a young newlywed with his wife Sharon, a renowned weaver, and let himself be pulled into a meditative daily routine of crow observation.

“I was spending long, long hours under these watching posts, and I could watch several nests at a time. So I was looking to see where the crows were going. Where were they getting their food, looking at these interactions,” he says. 

“You get into the mind of the crow. And we found that we got into that whole rhythm of the island. The time of the day didn't really matter as much as the position of the tide or what was happening on the island … You're not going home and watching television. You're out there all the time, watching all this, while you're having meals, you're outside, and you're hearing all the things around, the crows are around, everything is around you and you're totally immersed in it.”

Some key findings from Butler’s research, which he published with ornithologist Nicolaas Verbeek, include that crows often have “helpers,” a third bird that is not a parent but which hangs around the nest and participates in defending it, helps to feed the nestlings and fledglings and is fed in turn by the adult male crow in a cooperative arrangement that aids in the survival of baby crows.

He also researched the complex way in which crows learned how to select and crack clams according to their specific sizes and the height with which they needed to be dropped in order to break effectively — too high and it could be stolen by another crow near the ground before the first one can swoop down to get it — too low, and it wouldn’t open. 

“They're very good at optimizing the right size clam to get the most meat for the least effort. And they’re very, very good. It takes a few years for them to specialize on this and do it,” says Butler.

Another new discovery about crow behaviour, published last year, was prompted by a particularly vicious crow fight that Robert and Sharon witnessed in a park after they finished an outdoor exercise class.

“One of the crows had got its combatant onto its back and was beating the living daylights out of it, and half a dozen or more other crows assembled, and they were all shrieking and calling and egging it on as if it was like a school yard,” Butler says. “But the really surprising thing is that several of them got down on the ground and went over, and they didn't try to stop the one on the top, but joined in and started pulling at the wings and the tail of the poor guy on the bottom.”

After speaking with a primatologist friend who noted that primates do the same thing, Butler realized they were engaging in something known as “coalitional fighting,” in which crows — particularly low-ranking ones — will work together to depose a dominant one and bring it down.

All of these stories, along with his adventures on Mitlenatch Island, have been documented in Butler’s new book Society of Crows, which will be released in February and is illustrated by his own pen and ink drawings.

Described as “an avian melodrama and a scientific detective story,” the book also sheds light on an enduring Vancouver-area phenomenon in which an estimated 15,000 crows flock to Still Creek in Burnaby every night at dusk to roost.

Robert and Sharon first started studying this behaviour in the 1970s, racing around after the birds in their car, trying to figure out where they were coming from and where they were going. And it turns out the crows originally used to roost on Bowyer Island in Howe Sound.

“Something happened on the island. It might have been a great horned owl out there, not sure. But anyway, they gave up, and we discovered very soon after that, instead of flying west, they were flying towards Burnaby,” says Butler. “So we did the same thing, followed them, and located them in 1972 or ’73. We've got it down to the actual date. There was a couple thousand of them just beside BCIT in a wood lot, and they stayed there for a while, and then they moved down to their present location.” 

McKinlay said it’s this kind of groundbreaking research that inspired him to document Butler’s life and work in the film, which he also hopes will be used to help promote his book.

“I just knew there was a very lovely, sweet little love story there, not just with him and his wife, but just with these crows. And I was like, ‘I gotta capture it,’” says McKinlay, who adds that Butler’s contribution to the world of corvid research is hard to overstate. “We’ll be out shooting, and David Suzuki will call him to fact-check something. I mean, Rob is the guy. He came up with all the original ideas and theories around crows.”

Society of Crows: The Art and Practice of Dr. Rob Butler can be watched for free on the Knowledge Network website. For more information about the book Society of Crows visit their website.

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