Laura Young was at a breaking point when she submitted a post titled “Request: Make 500-1,000 crows leave my street alone” to the subreddit r/lifeprotips in January. “I think you can tell that I was feeling very frustrated and running out of options and I clearly needed help,” she said.
Starting last October, Laura’s neighborhood in Baltimore was the site of a massive crow roost. And unlike past years’ roosts, which usually only last a few weeks with a few dozen crows, this one showed no signs of leaving. “The numbers that they’ve attracted ever since then are unbelievable,” she said. “I mean, we’re at the point where it is frightening to walk out at night.”
According to Laura, hundreds of them filled the trees in the park outside her apartment. “And they’re all screaming,” she said. “It is loud enough to wake you up indoors with all the windows closed. I don’t think anyone on my block has slept past 6:00am in three months.”
There was the noise, and then there was the poop: coating the streets, the buildings, and the cars. “It is just disgusting. I’ve never spent so much money on car washes in my entire life,” she laughed.
Laura works in marketing, but she got her degree in wildlife conservation and worked with birds across the U.S. for five years. But even she was at a loss about what to do. She tried scaring them off with a laser pointer — one of her neighbors busted out a vuvuzela to do the same — but nothing made them budge.
So she turned to Reddit to see if anyone there had ideas, but that avenue was mostly fruitless. Someone suggested playing the sounds of owls, a natural predator of crows, to convince them to change roosting spots. Laura rigged up a speaker in her window to play them, but that didn’t work either.
After SciFri producer D Peterschmidt heard about Laura’s situation, they got her in touch with Kaeli Swift, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, who has a speciality in crows. They talk about why these roosts happen, the deadly history of crow exterminations, how other cities have ethically addressed large roosts and how human-wildlife conflicts don’t always have easy solutions.
Check out more on the Science Friday page here.
