And so it begins.
For the next few weeks, government buildings and college campuses in Pennsylvania will use sound effects, lasers, and controlled explosions to wage a strange, almost hallucinatory war against wintering crows — like a psyops version of those spikes you find under bridges.
Pennsylvania Capitol Police announced this week that they'll be discharging exploding shells and whistling devices to deter the brainy birds from roosting at the complex, a dispersal program now in its 25th year.
The goal isn’t to hurt them but to annoy them so much they refuse to stick around.
Pitt has recently turned to holiday laser lights and audio recordings of the crow’s natural predators, while Penn State has used fireworks — aka “bird bangers” — in a targeted campaign plainly described by the school’s Office of Physical Plant as “periodic crow harassment.”
It’s like Noriega’s last stand, only with less Axl Rose.
There are other tools in the box: California University in Washington County used a grape-scented chemical fog as a deterrent, and New York’s Cortland County did the same.
The reason for all of this is perhaps best summed up by this intro from a 2017 article that ran in Pitt’s student newspaper, The Pitt News:
As junior Virginia Lefever walked out of her Vertebrate Morphology lab in Langley Hall on a Tuesday night last semester, she heard what sounded like the onset of a minor rainstorm.
But it wasn’t raindrops plunking onto the pavement. It was crow feces.
“My friends and I liked to joke about needing an umbrella around campus. That’s what you have to do to get through [the crows],” Lefever, a biology and political science major, said.
Kate St. John, a bird expert and author of the Outside My Window blog, told The Incline that as migrating crows land in Pennsylvania from colder locales up north, they (and it) add up quickly.
“When you’ve got 10,000 pooping crows in the trees around the Cathedral of Learning and Heinz Memorial Chapel, it doesn’t smell good, and it’s slippery when wet, and by the end of December, they have a real issue,” St. John explained.
Heinz Chapel Director Pat Gibbons expanded on this to City Paper in 2016, saying, “I didn’t want to have to be the one to have to deal with a bride whose dress had been dipped in it.”
So around this time each year, places like Pitt begin to roll out a Home Alone-worthy gauntlet of obstacles, figuring “audio scarecrows” and “bird bangers” will keep them from becoming an open air toilet for some of the smartest birds on the planet. Fair enough.
But the crows are on to them.
A 2002 study found lasers to be effective but extremely short-lived: “... there was no lasting effect as crows returned in most cases within a few minutes and reoccupied the roosts. No roost was abandoned for even one night, nor did crow numbers decrease at the treated roosts.”
At Pitt, the predator soundtrack worked in 2013, but by 2017 the birds were shrugging.
“The crows have moved — but only across the street,” Michelle Kienholz told the Outside My Window blog. “They’ve already figured out the scarecrow. It’s annoyingly loud but not scary.”
(For what it’s worth, angry farmers in Cayuga County, New York, tried to blow up thousands of sleeping crows with 500 shrapnel bombs in 1949 and “missed ‘em all,” per Syracuse.com.)
The New York Times wrote in 2019 that crows and humans have shared space for tens of thousands of years, “and in all likelihood, we’ve been trying to chase them away just as long.”
The article, titled “How to Scare a Crow,” goes on to suggest faking deaths (“crows will avoid areas where comrades were killed”), undulating inflatable air dancers, motion sensors, and more.
Alternatively, source John Marzluff, a professor of forest sciences at the University of Washington, said, consider leaving them alone:
Many birds can’t live in the urban and suburban spaces we build, but crows are remarkably adaptable to human-made landscapes. “We should celebrate and value these species that are able to survive with us,” Marzluff says. “If we don’t, it’s going to be a pretty lonely existence.”
That’s unlikely to happen at Pennsylvania’s soiled public universities or Capitol building, and their deterrents are unlikely to move the birds from warm roosts and easy food sources for long. “To scare a crow, you need variability and unpredictability,” Marzluff added.
The point being, tactics will evolve and this war — overlapping with Pennsylvania's ongoing War on Bugs — may be forever.
—Colin Deppen, PA Local editor |
