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Downtown Sunnyvale, California, has been bustling since the coronavirus pandemic began. More than a thousand visitors spent a night in town almost every evening for almost two years.
But they don’t come for ramen or beer at the gastro pub. They eat whatever they find outside. Then they poop all over the sidewalks. Unwelcome guests that no one invites: the crows. And now the city turns to an unexpected weapon to disperse them: lasers.
Sunnyvale mayor Larry Klein said city officials have struggled to get rid of the birds for at least the past five years, but the situation has worsened as the crow population skyrocketed during the pandemic.
“The streets are basically filled with crow poop,” he said on Sunday.
Streets aren’t the only ones drowning in Sunnyvale, about 40 miles southeast of San Francisco. Mr. Klein said that crows sometimes leave sticks, leaves or excrement on outdoor meals.
To disperse the birds, the city will turn this month into a Silicon Valley-enabled tool: a $20 laser. The mayor said city officials had tried to chase the crows away with a hawk, but had only “limited success”.
It may sound like a futuristic solution, but lasers proven to scare the crows away. In New York State, Rochester and Auburn have used lasers to repel birds with some success.
Mr. Klein said Sunnyvale employees would spend an hour each evening for three weeks shining a light on the crows with a green laser. They will also use a stereo to play the sounds of endangered crows.
“The biggest thing is to harass them enough so that a large percentage of them find new homes,” said Mr. Klein.
The crows gather in the city center at dusk, after spending the day foraging for food.
When crows saw a glowing green laser on trees at night, they thought the animals were flying over branches, said Kevin J. McGowan, an ornithologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY. They will fly to another place to sleep.
But after working with crows for more than 30 years, Dr. “Crows are a tough game to disperse because some birds don’t want to leave a place where they’ve settled,” McGowan said.
He also suggested that Sunnyvale officials launch fireworks and rockets at the birds, which would “drive them crazy”, he said.
Dr. McGowan said that even after all these efforts, the crows may not want to go. He gave an example in Auburn, where authorities relocated around 75,000 crows to less populated areas in the 1990s. But they still congregate in parts of the city.
“They’re like teenagers and Covid,” he said. “You can’t stop them from getting together.”
But not everyone supports Sunnyvale’s laser plans. Mr Klein said the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society, a local environmental group, believes the laser has the potential to harm birds.
Kaeli Swift, a postdoctoral researcher on crows at the University of Washington, says the 1,000 crows in Sunnyvale are a “moderate roost” when compared to flocks in other cities.
Dr. Cities across the country have struggled with rising crow populations over the past few years, Swift said, but such flocks have nothing to do with how the pandemic has emptied the streets.
“Roosts are roaming around—we don’t know exactly why,” he said, adding that when crows migrate from Canada, the roosts get larger in the winter.
It seems that the crows may never completely leave Sunnyvale. The only way to get rid of it all illegallike blowing up crows with dynamite Illinois officials in 1940 When they killed more than 300,000 birds.
Dr. McGowan said that despite the increasing numbers of crows, the human residents of Sunnyvale do not need to worry about their health.
“You’d have to lick all the crow droppings from a park bench to come even from afar to catching anything from a crow’s roost,” he said.
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