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January 27, 2010

Mark Bennett: It’s time to show the crows who’s really the boss

By Mark Bennett

If we resign ourselves to lives spent cowering under poop-splotched umbrellas, then the crows win.

Terre Haute needs to open up a can of crow whoop-ass.

Some say it can’t be done. And, indeed, there is no simple solution to the annual invasion of 30,000 to 80,000 of these uninvited guests of the community. But if we can put a man on the moon, clone sheep and send e-mail halfway around the planet in seconds, then there has to be a feasible way to reduce our crow population.

Currently, the crows rule the roost from their September arrival until their March departure. They eat, caw and defecate. We dodge, wash and grumble. The balance of power needs to shift.

It’s too late to mount a significant offensive this winter. By March or early April, most of the crows will leave to breed in a woodlands far away. They won’t return till autumn. This time, Terre Haute should be ready for them.

In the meantime, this town needs a Crow Summit.

“We need a plan now for next fall,” said Jim Luzar, educator for the Purdue University Cooperative Extension Service in Vigo County.

Before the full flock arrives, the crows send in their scouts to scope out the city’s warmest, safest, most accommodating hangouts. Then they invite more friends than a Facebooker ever dreamed of, pop open some discarded fast-food bags, and the party’s on.

“If we start working on a game plan for 2010 to scare off those scouts, it’ll make a big difference,” Luzar said.

That is no simple task, as Luzar and others familiar with crows’ behavior emphasize. The birds are smart. If our scare tactics become too predictable, they adapt and ignore them. Yet, if we’re not persistent, they wait us out and come back when our fervor fades. They seem to realize that it’s illegal to discharge firearms inside a city’s limits, and that systematically poisoning them with laced bait triggers outrage by some animal activist groups.

“It’s a tough one,” said Darrel Zeck, public affairs director for Terre Haute Mayor Duke Bennett.

As the mayor himself put it, “People think I should just get rid of the crows. Well, what am I supposed to do?”

There is no one-size-fits-all answer for something that’s bedeviled the city since the 1990s, when the crows took a liking to its proximity to the Wabash River and farm fields, and its urban warmth and lighting. But a summit of crow experts from Purdue and Indiana State universities and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, local officials, business leaders, and nature and wildlife enthusiasts could produce a cohesive, cost-effective strategy against these beaked insurgents.

“It’s going to take coordination,” Luzar said.

One possible tack is to greet those scout crows with a large, orchestrated mix of pyrotechnics and recordings of crow death cries, Luzar said.

The involvement of city and county government is essential to any crow dispersal effort, said Joy Sacopulos of Trees Inc. in Terre Haute, “but we need the will to do it.”

Bennett considers the crows “a nasty problem. It’s disgusting what they leave behind. It’s absolutely a problem.” That said, the city must assess whether the problem is serious enough to commit ever-dwindling funds toward a remedy. “It’s taxpayer dollars,” Zeck said, “and we have to be fiscally responsible.”

The crows cause real headaches and frustration. The birds began congregating around the North Eighth Street home of Toni Wilson this winter, after a parking lot near Union Hospital replaced nearby houses. Their mess “is horrible,” she said. “The smell is nauseating.”

So Wilson, a reservation assistant at Hulman Center, tried to shoo away the crows with a regimen of noise, clanging pots and pans together, clapping her hands, blowing whistles. In a tree outside her house, she draped silver streamers from branches, an anti-crow tactic. They’d leave, briefly, then come back. She’s purchased a “Crowbegone” CD of crow-repellant sounds, and intends to play it each evening and morning. “I don’t know what else to do,” Wilson said.

Some people and businesses have gone to the extreme measure of cutting down trees, where crows gather by the hundreds at night. Both Sacopulos and Zeck strongly urge residents to resist that option. “We are begging people — please don’t cut down the trees to get rid of the crows,” Sacopulos said. That approach exchanges one quality-of-life setback for another. “We really wouldn’t want them to do that,” Zeck said. “Because you cut down one tree, and [the crows] will move to another tree. And then come springtime, a tree you’ve had around 150, 200 years is now gone.”

A communitywide crow plan could give Hauteans better options. The first step is empathizing with folks who live or work in the crow’s hotspots.

Sacopulos, a “bird lover,” realized the crows’ negative force the day she saw a man driving down Ohio Street with his car door open. He couldn’t see out his windshield, which was coated by crow droppings. “If the people who are not bothered by the crows would see how other people are, I think they would have more mercy in their hearts for what they have to go through,” Sacopulos said.

So, will Terre Haute take on the crows this fall, or will we let them keep pooping on us?

Mark Bennett can be reached at (812) 231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.

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