Being pro-crow, I was disgusted to read about another person complaining about the birds in the Burnaby News Leader. Barbara Watt, some fish inspecting twit, had little compassion for the birds and their use of the Still Creek area for their nightly roosting. It seems that, while the Burnaby roost hasn’t changed, the trees the roosting crows once used were cut down six months ago, forcing the birds to encroach into the office district.

“If you want a volunteer with a pellet gun, I’m in,” she says, offering two lame reasons for wanting to get rid of the birds: the excrement on the soles of her shoes and, most especially, because the birds make her wash her car.*

Let’s see, humans – a pestilential species – can flush their shit down the toilet with impunity, not really giving any thought into whose backyard it goes, yet they can cut down the crows’ habitat and then complain when the birds land a poop in our territories.

Along with the whiners who live on our clearcut mountainsides and freak out when a bear gobbles up their shih tzu, it’s obvious Vancouverites are liars when they say they live here for the nature. What? You only want the bald eagles and the killer whales?

*Birds shitting on your car is good luck, in Romanian superstition. Canadians really should learn to appreciate this fact.

Yup. Some vandal has definitely tagged the country-style spirit bear at the corner of Smythe and Burrard outside the Paramount Theatre.

Graffiti has been part of the urban scene since before Rome’s most famous citizen scrawled “Julius wuz here” on beachfront property in England. It will always be with us.

Actually, some of it, I don’t mind; on back alleys, overpasses and underneath bridges, people with too much time on their hands can go ahead and stake out as much turf as they like. Some of the art is even appealing.

I don’t even like this particular spirit bear all that much (It just looks, well… stupid). But it hardly seems fair for one self-styled underground artist to deface the artistic creation of another.

Isn’t there some kind of graffiti artist constitution that makes it beyond the pale to actually tag an existing piece of public art? To me, this kind of graffiti isn’t cool or counter-cultural. It’s just plain anti-social, in the most extreme definition of the term.

By the way, does anyone have a favorite piece of public art they’d like to mention? Mine is the War of the Worlds tripod things by English Bay beach.

Bob Brown Bear, originally uploaded by baseballart.

Maktaaq has already blogged about the Spirit Bears [sb] located around Vancouver [mbv]. Nay, not blogged but raged against the art machine that created the individually painted bears positioned around town.

Meanwhile I pass one on Cordova by Canada Place every night on my way from the Waterfront Skytrain Station home after work. I try to give it a high-five, unless there’s a bit puddle in front of it, because you know it’s just standing there with its arm out asking for one.

And you can’t high-five a real bear can you [cn]?