Officials Ward Off 20,000 Crows With Flares and Lasers in Upstate New York, an Annual Battle Waged in Cities Nationwide

Tens of thousands of crows coming to town in a cawing, swirling, dark mass sounds like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. But in cities across the United States where crows are taking over, residents and officials are faced with a dilemma. Should they let the highly intelligent birds be, or roust them away from downtown areas?

In Rochester, New York, frustrations with the crow population, which reaches upwards of 20,000 each night during the holiday season, have prompted city officials to use serious scare tactics to ward off the roosts.

According to David Andreatta of the New York Times, beaming lasers at buildings, shining high-powered flashlights into the night sky and playing recordings of distressed corvid sounds are all part of the non-lethal arsenal that wildlife specialists in Rochester have an annual habit of using to break up massive “murders,” as groups of crows are known.

A news clip from 13WHAM ABC News, a local Rochester channel, shows an official in a yellow vest firing a flare gun into the sky while crows circle overhead and sit in dense clumps in nearby trees.

“It’s non-lethal, doesn’t hurt them, just moves them,” Karen St. Aubin, the city’s director of operations, tells the network.

Methods to disperse large roost of crows begin in downtown Rochester

Watch on

Crows roost in cities out of convenience—especially during the winter, when the ambient heat of the urban area helps keep them warm. Lights at night, as well as open spaces like grassy parks and parking lots, make tracking and hunting prey easier.

“Crows basically like what human beings have done to North America,” Kevin McGowan at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology told the New York Times’ James Gorman back in 2004, when Auburn, New York, was facing such high numbers of crow visitors that residents were encouraged kill as many as possible in a controversial “Crow Shoot” competition.

“They’re better off being in a big group, where they get the benefit of all those eyes looking out for danger,” John Marzluff, a corvid expert at the University of Washington and the author of Gifts of the Crow, explained to the Atlantic’s Tove Danovich in March.

But city officials complain that crows are far too messy: “The problem is that these are not little birds, and these are not little drops they leave behind. They’re big, slimy and disgusting,” Shelly Larson, the superintendent of community improvements in Danville, Illinois, told the Chicago Tribune in 2021. The Midwestern town has a human population of under 30,000, but it regularly contends with more than 100,000 crows.

“We used to have to powerwash benches, sidewalks, statues,” St. Aubin of Rochester tells the New York Times. “It’s really about maintenance. Some of these larger roosts are in public places, and they can make them unusable.”

She reasons that the $9,000 the city spends on crow deterrence each year is worth it. Some Rochester residents disagree and find their city’s methods excessively cruel to the birds.

A Facebook group called “Rochesterians for Crows” has more than 1,000 members. According to its bio, the group began in February 2012 “in response to the city’s intolerable actions against the massively intelligent and often misunderstood bird that tends to polarize communities across the nation.”

The group’s members share reverent photos of the roosts, memes that say things like “be the crow you wish to see in the world” and petitions to curb what they see as aggressive anti-crow action.

Some members of the group point toward Portland, Oregon, as a role model for dealing with urban crow populations. They cheer Portland’s purchase of the so-called “Poopmaster 6000”—a high-powered, ride-on street sweeper and scrubber—as a way to address the problem of corvid feces without disturbing the birds.

The Bird Alliance of Oregon states that the Portland nonprofit managing city cleanliness has committed to using non-lethal tactics to deal with crows and even testified in favor of a ban on crow poisons. But in recent years, Portland has also leaned on hazing, including contracting licensed falconers who use Harris’s Hawks to push the crows away from downtown.

“The hazing has been very successful,” writes the Bird Alliance of Oregon. The hawks, without touching the crows, have steered them toward parks and green spaces along the Willamette River, where conflicts with humans are reduced. “Among the various hazing alternatives, it is probably least disruptive and closest to what they might experience under natural circumstances.”

McGowan, for one, thinks Rochester’s efforts are in the right direction, although he now adds to the New York Times that “you can get them out of a neighborhood or away from the town hall, but you’re not going to get rid of them.”

One poster in the Facebook group, a self-described “corvid fanatic” who only recently learned about Rochester’s predicament, finds the very idea of dispersing crows “ignorant and repugnant.”

“I’d pay cash to experience a massive crow roosting such as the ones your elected officials are spending your taxes trying to disperse,” he adds. “Rebrand Rochester as Crow City and place a few tiny ads in some birding magazines. The hotels will soon fill, the restaurants will have to hire more staff and EVERYBODY WINS.”

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.