The bird is on the ground, wings spread out flat against the pavement, eyes closed, heartbeat ticking slower and slower, unresponsive — but alive. Sometimes there is a brown liquid foam leaking from the beak. Then a human hand tips that beak skyward, a plunger of nasal naloxone goes in, and on the videos the Good Caws Crow Rescue Society has been posting, something close to a miracle follows: the crow blinks, rights itself, and flies off into the Prince George sky.
The society’s volunteers have been administering the overdose-reversal spray — the same medication used on people — to crows they suspect have eaten toxic drugs left exposed in the downtown core, an area where illicit drug use is known to occur. “It’s disheartening, it’s scary,” the group’s Dayna Slater told CBC Radio West host Sarah Penton. “It’s a whole bunch of factors coming together to make, like, the perfect storm.”
The storm is intensifying, by her count. In past years the society saw one or two suspected crow overdoses annually; this year they have recorded more than a dozen. Some birds have died. Most, she said, recovered enough to be released within 24 hours.
Dr. Kaitlyn Liukaitis of the Birchwood Veterinary Clinic, who has helped treat some of the birds, said their symptoms are consistent with a toxic drug overdose, and she is not surprised naloxone reverses them — it has become a common veterinary tool across a variety of species. “It’s always frustrating that, as a human population, we’re so damaging to the environment,” she said.
A City Inside Its Own Storm
The crows are falling over in the same blocks where the human version of the emergency shrieks loudest. Cities across British Columbia have issued public warnings over the rising toxicity of the illicit supply, and in Prince George overdose calls have at times tripled — a near-constant wail of sirens downtown, right where the birds are found. Fentanyl dominates the province’s market, a pattern stark enough that it shows up in Statistics Canada’s wastewater surveys of Canadian cities. Outreach groups say a growing political backlash against harm reduction — supervised consumption sites, prescribed alternatives to street drugs — is making it harder for people with addictions to get help, and they argue for safe indoor spaces to use, in part precisely so drugs are not left lying outdoors.
Slater, for her part, is working with those very harm reduction groups. They have been key to spotting crows in distress, and they have helped supply expired naloxone kits for her volunteers to use on the birds. She does not believe anyone is poisoning the crows on purpose. The overdoses, she said, are a symptom of larger problems.
“They live side-by-side with us. They’re in our garbage, they’re in our yards,” she said. “They’re a direct mirror of the environment that we are living in.” Her suspicion is that the drugs reach the crows mixed into garbage left openly accessible downtown, and her proposed fix is disarmingly municipal: more covered garbage cans. “A crow doesn’t know the difference between a sandwich bag and a bag that had something in it. And it takes something the size of like a grain of sand to affect a bird.”