Tokyo battles monstrous murder of crows Tokyo is renewing its bitter battle against crows which, despite the city's best efforts to wipe them out, continue to circle over its mean streets in search of unprotected rubbish and unsuspecting air-to-ground attack victims. The war on the massed squadrons of jungle crows (Corvus macrorhynchos) began back in 2001, when one …
Hehe... a bird that is smart enough to use cars and traffic lights as tools to crack nuts is not going to go down that easy. There is some really impressive footage by the BBC Wildlife team featuring David Attenborough where a Japanese jungle crow drops a nut in the middle of a pedestrian crossing into traffic, has it cracked and patiently waits until the light for the cars turns red. Then it goes and collects the scraps. In fact, I would not be surprised if they now have learned to press the buttons on the crossing. After all, the crow family are the only other animal besides dolphins and higher apes to pass the mirror test for self-awareness.
We have the same problem in Aberdeen with seagulls. They get pretty big scavenging the leftover kabobs and pizzas strewn about after a beery night out.
They're pretty mean too - I saw one kill & eat a pigeon. I seems to recall a story about some woman who's little rat of a dog got attacked too.
It's only a matter of time before they eat someone's baby.
Won't somebody think of the children and make some kind of automatic seagull targeting turret?
The problem with crows is that they wake you up early in the morning and that eventually takes its toll.
A coworker of mine has been coming to work pretty beat and complaining about crows for months now.. I know the feeling, up until 3 years ago it was me angrily dashing out the balcony armed with a mop.
Trash is a big problem indeed.. Tokyo is a great city, we have a real-size Gundam models, but no public trash bins !
Leaving the trash outside in designated translucent plastic bags is just not a great idea.
These are not crows. Japan's version of DARPA have succesfully created self-replicating, high-artificial intelligence, autonomous death bringers intent on softening up the puny human race before the final onslaught of death-weilding killer robots. I bet the training video is reminiscent of that scene in Omen II when the woman gets her eyes pecked out by one of the prototypes before stumbling blindly into the path of an oncoming artic!
The last time I read a story about this, the upshot was that Tokyo citizens were simply putting garbage/rubbish in plastic bags and leaving it on the curb/kerb. Switching to metal or hard plastic cans/bins (a) keeps some excess plastic out of landfills and (b) a crow-resistant trash can is not a big engineering task.
Take the crows' food source away and their murder will shrink.
So they killed 105K of the estimated 36K that were there when they decided to take action and there's still >20k remaining? Where are all the crow reinforcements coming from?
I've visited Tokyo a few times and there's certainly plenty of them about. At least they noise they make isn't as annoying as that of seagulls. My Japanese friend told me that if you attack a crow it will remember you and get its revenge some day...
Nice one, El Reg.
I'd forgotten that collective term for crows is a 'murder'. Where's my English teacher when I want him? OK, 6 ft. down....
Incidentally, http://bertc.com/subfive/recipes/threecrows.htm has three recipes for ensuring the buggers don't reap revenge. Unless it's a sore ringpiece...
I recall reading a wonderful story about crows when I was a language student in Hakodate, Japan, the southernmost city in Hokkaido. I looked it up and will quote verbatim from the account of Mr. H. T. Snow, as he described events in 1876:
"Upon the occasion of the visit of the Emperor to Hakodate, a crow, when flying over the imperial carriage, so far forgot himself as to commit an indignity on His Imperial Majesty. The people of Hakodate were very angry, and a price was set, not upon the head of Mr. Crow, but upon his feet, the authorities paying four cents per pair for all crow's feet brought in to the police. I was in Hakodate during the winter when this regulation was in force. It soon had the effect of reducing the number of crows."
The local historians noted that children hunted with slings and became so good at hunting crows that they were almost extinct in the Hakodate region. So the bounty was eliminated, and within a couple of years, the crow population was back to previous levels.
BTW, I should note that Japanese crows are not like European crows. They're quite different animals, they're much larger and they have big sharp bills that look like a parrot's. Their beak can tear through metal cans and bite through wires. In Tokyo, crows are notorious for stealing wire coat hangers and bending them into nests. They can bend wire like a European crow bends straw.
In Singapore I used to watch them visiting the breakfast tables of one of the bit hotels by the river, and pick sugar and sweetener sachets out of the little trays until they found the "right" one (they seemed to prefer the plain white sugar). They'd then carry the sachet upstairs to the infinity ledge of the swimming pool, and soak the sachet to open it, getting an intense sugary drink for breakfast whilst the office workers in the city below did the same thing with their coffees!
Admittedly they wwere the more genteel European sized crows, but that's still pretty cool use of tools
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