Coexisting with Crows
(Page 3 of 4)
Contributing editor Barbara Pleasant shares her home in the
mountains of western North Carolina with three pairs of
crows. Her Web site is www.barbara
pleasant.com
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When Crows Come to Town
Cities and towns from Kansas to New York share a serious
problem every winter. Murders (the name for a group of
crows) — ranging from 1,000 to 75,000 individual
crows — establish winter roosts in street-side trees,
making a great ruckus and drenching cars and sidewalks with
their droppings. Beyond being messy and odoriferous, the
massive amount of droppings may pose a public health
hazard.
But getting roosting crows to disperse is far from simple.
Trained wildlife-control professionals typically use a
combination of harassment techniques including pyrotechnics
(exploding shells and firecrackers) and playing tapes of
crow death cries and hawk screams at ear-splitting levels.
To be effective, crow hazing campaigns must be conducted
several days in a row in early evening or just before dawn,
the times when crows are naturally mobile. But the plans
can backfire when crows forced to abandon a roost next to
the county courthouse find a new roost in trees around a
church or school.
To avoid such failures, some towns spend thousands of
dollars on crow-control specialists. One such firm, Bird
Control International, uses a combination of trained hawks
and falcons, broadcast distress calls, high-powered
spotlights and pyrotechnics to move roosting crows to
places where they can better wait out the winter
Eat no Crow
As the saying goes, “eating crow” means
enduring a humiliating experience. The story behind the
phrase dates back to the War of 1812, when an American
hunter shot a crow behind British lines. To disgrace the
hunter, a British officer made the hunter eat some of the
crow. Later, the tables turned when the hunter regained his
musket and forced the Brit to finish off the bird. Crow
tastes terrible, largely due to the birds’ eclectic
diets. Crows eat more than 600 different foods, and
one-third of their diet consists of animal matter. To
carnivorous crows, rotting possum carcasses are as
delectable as grasshoppers, spiders, frogs or the corn seed
you plant in your garden
