Tokyo crows
I have noticed a couple things, both are said to be related to the coronavirus pandemic. First, the number of large crows in Tokyo is way down. Crows used to be everywhere, but not any more. A Saturday, April 9, 2022 story in the English-language Japan Times newspaper reported that in 2020, Tokyo authorities counted an estimated 11,000 crows at around 40 locations in the city, less than a third of its peak population in 2001. I have noticed it myself. Two kinds of large crow inhabit Tokyo - the jungle crow and the carrion crow. They are not the simple blackbirds that I called “crows” when I was growing up. They are what I called “ravens.” There used to be some here on my street. They were always loud, they would always try to pick at our garbage, and they even sometimes swooped down and attacked people on the street during spring time nesting season. (I was attacked once, several years ago.) But the coronavirus pandemic changed people’s behaviour in such a way that it also affected the kind of garbage we throw out, and the crows who feed off the garbage have moved elsewhere.
Second is a great reduction in the amount of paper flyer advertisements I get in my mailbox. That’s stuff like pizza delivery, local restaurants, sushi shops, ramen shops, health/sports clubs, local realtors, hair salons, package delivery and home moving services, and more. I usually take a photograph of all the mailbox flyers before throwing the papers away, and I post those pictures on Facebook so that people back home can see what Japanese writing looks like. Anyway, in recent months I’ve noticed that the amount and variety of paper that gets shoved into my mailbox has shrunk. This suggests to me that the coronavirus pandemic has affected local economic activity at least in this locally measurable regard.