200 Dead Crows Over Christmas break in 2017 the Chief Epidemiologist for the State of Massachusetts was catching up reading annual reports that various local government entities published when he read that Animal Control for the City of Boston had picked up over 200 dead crows, year to date. He was pretty excited because it might be something contagious like bird flu or possibly Zika so he called called Boston animal control and talked to them, “Yep!” the animal control officer said, “We’ve still got ‘em in the freezer but we’re thinking of sending them to the incinerator to get rid of them.” The epidemiologist told them to hold on to them, he’d pick them up the next day and he did. He brought the dead crows over to the Department of Wildlife labs and asked them to autopsy them and be on the lookout for a viral cause of death. The vet called back in a week and said, “Nope! No virus, looks like they all died from vehicular impact, mostly by a white vehicle.” Now that is extremely specific and odd bit of information so now the epidemiologist is wondering is there some sicko out there running over crows with his car? So the vet and the epidemiologist pick flecks of paint off every one of the crows, puts the flecks in tubes and sends them to the state CSI lab. Can you identify the year, make and model of the vehicle from the paint flecks? Sure thing! the CSI lab says and sure enough, a month later the lab report arrives, all the paint came from various models...of big white box trucks! Now nobody involved can figure out what is going on so they get a couple of wildlife biologists to go out and videotape crows near highways. Pretty quickly the biologist report back. It turns out that crows really like to eat roadkill but they are also cautious, they always have one crow nearby in a tree to act as a lookout for something dangerous. So it turns out that, in Boston, all of the crow sentries can say Cah! but none of them can say Truck!