Even the Crows are Packing Up

On my first encounter with Tehran, I didn't even leave the airport. Though it seems like an odd place to transit, I had found a cheap flight from Baku to Dubai with a very long layover in Tehran. Customs was long, but so was the stopover.

The second time was arriving from the north in the huge, sprawling city that sits at the foot of extremely high mountains like some Andean capital. A mass of more than 12 million people, each it seems with their own cars and their own ideas of traffic lanes...but it somehow works.

Crossing the streets in the city is an art, albeit a dangerous one...one where you see people dancing amidst 6 lanes of speeding traffic at all hours of the day. This traffic however leads to the thick mass of smog that snuggles up to the skirts of the mountain and often obscures the city from the expensive terraces that overlook the city.

Apparently the pollution has reached levels to where even the crows can no longer take it and they are packing up and deserting the city. Taking their cue from nightingales and pigeons, the hardy black bird is deserting the city.

"The continued existence of crows, particularly with the departure of other birds, had given us hope that wildlife could survive in the city. With their migration that hope is fading and our concern over the destructiveness of urban environments has deepened."

If the crows can't take it...time to think about investing some of that oil money in a metro system don't you think?