13 July 2024 – Oh, there’s Standard Time & Daylight Saving Time, and there’s Pacific Time & Mountain Time & Central Time & Eastern Time & Atlantic Time (& Newfoundland Time). Plus the zones and adjustments that grid the rest of the world. All of them coded to numbers.

Clock Time.

Then there’s Crow Time.

No numbers, just quality of light. The shifting intensity of light that signals, each dawn, the right moment to leave the roost and, each dusk, the right moment to return. That timing also measures the changing length of day.

Vancouver crows (corvus caurinus) are ours by day only. Each night they roost in neighbouring Burnaby, and my building is beside a major flight path between the two locations. While (I must confess) I’ve never witnessed the morning influx, I have often watched the evening exodus spell-bound.

Sometimes a flurry passes close to my balcony…

but, more typically, air currents stream the birds a bit farther north, speckles against a more distant sky.

In between waves, it is an empty sky.

But only until the inevitable straggler comes into view.

Flapping his wings like crazy as he tries to catch up.

In Crow Time, Vancouver dusk these days occurs about 9:30 p.m. Mid-winter, it’s more like 4:30. Allow for the seasonal time-shift — that’s still a four-hour difference.

Sigh! I can hear you muttering, “Fine, but… total length of day? Because that’s only the dusk half of the equation.” True, and since I’ve never personally witnessed Vancouver dawn, Crow Time, I have to trust boring old Clock Time calculations found on the internet.

At summer solstice, some 16 hrs:15 min. of daylight; at winter solstice, just 8 hrs:11 min.

Come mid-winter, those crows get to do some serious sleeping in!