Doug and Melanie Murdy have lived in their Westsyde home for two years and have never noticed any signs of bones accumulating on the roof.

Image Credit: FACEBOOK / Doug Murdy

When Doug Murdy went to get his mail nearly two weeks ago, he looked back at his house and something strange caught his eye.

“It kind of jumped out at me, it looked like a beer can,” Murdy says.

He was later sitting outside of his Westsyde home chatting with a friend about the sight. They decided to go look at the roof from a neighbour’s yard with binoculars.

“It looked like a dog bone, and so we took the ladder and decided to climb up to the roof,” Murdy says. “He climbs the ladder and he gets to the top and he goes, ‘you’re not going to believe this.’ There were 38 of them up there, and they were everywhere. They were in the gutter, they were on the roof… they all looked like the store-bought bones you buy for your dog to chew on, they’re all probably about six inches long and they’re all pretty much identical.”

When Murdy climbed the ladder and helped to collect the bones, the pair noticed that none of the other houses in the neighbourhood had any bones on their roofs.

He had no idea how they got there. He had the house built two years ago and hadn’t seen anything or heard any strange sounds on the roof.

“The house was built brand new,” Murdy says. “I called up the builder because he’s a good friend of mine. I said, ‘Is this some kind of builder voodoo you did on the house?’ He was laughing, and he said, ‘No.’”

Murdy’s wife snapped a photo of some of the bones and shared them with a local Facebook group. Many of the neighbours chimed in, believing it was a bird who was stealing and hiding the bones.

These are some of the 38 dog bones that Doug Murdy found on the roof of his Westsyde home.

Image Credit: FACEBOOK / Melanie Murdy

“There was one lady that said she has a husky and she lives nearby, and the magpies would team up on her husky. Two of them would distract the dog while two would steal the bones and fly off - and I said, ‘Well, they’re on my roof.’”

Larissa Deneault is a zookeeper at B.C. Wildlife Park and she says it's entirely plausible. She works directly with Igor, the raven who calls the park home. She says it’s very likely that a magpie, crow or raven could be the culprit.

“They’re so intelligent, so if they happened to find and easy food source... they would continue to come back and get that food source. If someone is giving their dog a bone pretty often and (the birds) found the dog wasn’t eating it, they would go down and snatch it for sure,” Deneault says.

Deneault says the omnivorous birds often snatch bones in hopes of scoring some leftover meat or marrow.

“They’re pretty opportunist with the type of food that they’ll eat, so they’ll pretty much eat whatever they can get, but they’re very notable in the wild for following things like wolves and scavenging off some of their kills. So any big predators, they’ve learned that they can go after the scraps after those guys have moved on,” Deneault says.

B.C. Wildlife Park's resident raven Igor sometimes gets bones as a treat.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED / Larissa Deneault

Murdy says he hasn’t spotted anymore on his roof, but he didn’t mind cleaning the bones out of his gutters.

“The whole neighbourhood, they were laughing at us while we were on the roof,” Murdy says. “With Covid now, everybody sits on their lawns now and talks to each other across the street, so the neighbours that we don’t even know, they were yelling at us and we were yelling back, it was a community bonding moment.”

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