9 December 2009

Pittsburgh and Wheeling aren’t the only towns with big winter crow flocks.

I read in yesterday’s Centre Daily Times that Penn State is tired of the 3,000 crows who come to campus every winter and roost in the big trees around town.  The poop is getting to everyone, so staff from the Office of Physical Plant are spending this week making a heck of a lot of noise to get the crows to move.  They have experience doing it.  This is their second winter of “The Crow Wars.”

Beginning about an hour after sunset, OPP staff shoot fireworks and noisemakers into the sky with the object of scaring the crows to a less populated roosting location.  Crows like to sleep with the lights on so Penn State floodlit a stand of trees at a preferred roosting site by the Visitors Center.  “Preferred” by humans because it’s not near us.

Will the crows they learn to love the Visitors Center?  Only time will tell.

 

(December 2011 note:  The original Centre Daily Times article has disappeared from their website. The photo above is from a Penn State News slideshow about Margaret Brittingham‘s & Grant Stokke’s Lancaster crow roost study. Click on the photo to see the original.)