10K reward offered for return of Vancouver's Canuck the crow
Credit to Author: Gordon McIntyre| Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2019 23:59:40 +0000
Canuck the Crow has disappeared before, but that was almost three years ago and it wasn’t for this long.
The four-year-old bird is missing and there is a $10,000 reward for his safe discovery, contributed by some of the bird’s 125,000-plus Facebook fans,
“I’m extremely worried, this isn’t like him at all,” Shawn Bergman, Canuck’s lifelong human friend, said on Wednesday.
The last time Bergman saw Canuck was around 3 p.m. on Friday in East Vancouver.
The crow, voted Metro Vancouver’s unofficial ambassador, is easily identified by the metal band on his right leg, which has on it a numbered federal registration designating him a protected wild bird, and an orange band that has been around his left leg all his life.
Alarmed and fearing for his feathered friend’s life, Bergman is pleading for anyone who hears a caw coming from inside a house or apartment to get in touch with him on the Facebook page Canuck and I or at canuckandi@gmail.com.
Shawn Bergman putting up reward posters for missing Canuck the Crow, on E Hastings.
“I think with a federal band and a number to call on it, I think if something had happened to Canuck we’d have gotten a call, so I’m leaning more toward someone having took him,” Bergman said. “I think he’s alive somewhere and somebody has him. Please keep your eyes and ears open.
“I’m holding out hope that whoever has him is trying to figure how to get him back and get the reward and not get in trouble.”
Pet detective Al MacLellan of Petsearchers Canada in Surrey said he didn’t have any tips.
Other than looking for a couple of parrots over the years, he doesn’t have experience looking for birds, he said.
“And the problem is, Canuck could be anywhere,” MacLellan said. “Where do you look?”
Bergman has searched everywhere in the neighbourhood, Canuck’s rookery, even scoured the PNE grounds after receiving a tip, but like all the other sightings he’s followed up, it was a false lead.
Come October 12,000 to 13,000 crows — including in normal times Canuck and his mate Cassiar — will head to the Still Creek rookery, Rob Butler, president of the Pacific WildLife Foundation, said.
That Canuck has been missing from his East Van rookery for five days is unsettling, the crow lecturer and retired SFU prof said.
“Prior to (October) some crows could have other roosts, but I don’t know that would apply to Canuck,” he said. “It would seem out of character.
“It’s beginning to look pretty desperate now. Like Shawn says, Canuck hung around his neighbourhood.”
Bergman is not the only one who’s heartbroken.
Cassiar has been separated twice before from Canuck, once when he was in Night Owl Bird Hospital in Kits 2 1/2 years ago after being beaten with a pole by a deranged soccer dad, and a few months before that when Canuck took an impromptu trip to Whistler (where he stole someone’s marijuana pipe off a balcony).
“The most difficult thing is watching Cassiar call for him all the time,” Bergman said. “I whistle for him like I always have, she’s never shown up before when I whistled for him.
“Now when I whistle for Canuck, she shows up to see if he’s there.”
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