Kill the birds

Will someone please do something about Bloomington’s crow problem?

I think I speak for many, if not most, when I say I hate the crows that descend upon us each winter.

They are ugly, loud and dirty. I imagine they carry diseases.

If you’re unlucky enough to have a large tree outside your bedroom window that has to hundreds of the black birds, you understand that during winter you will not enjoy the same kind of sleep you might enjoy during warmer months.

Their crowing is incessant. You also understand the damage your property endures due to their always-falling feces.

Life near the birds is near hell, and we can only imagine what Bloomington must be like in winter for the city’s ornithophobics — assuming they haven’t skipped town yet.
There are multiple solutions to our crow problem but only one real cure.

Watertown, N.Y., is another city with a bird problem. According to the Watertown Daily Times, the city shot pyrotechnics into the air to scare birds from their perches and used lasers and recordings of crow distress calls to harass the birds.

While the methods seemed to work for about a week, the birds came back.
Watertown learned something Indianapolis figured out decades ago — the way to eliminate a bird problem is to eliminate the birds.

In the 1960s, Indianapolis was a leader in pigeon control and was “probably the most pigeon-free city in the country,” according to the Daily Times.

The Eugene Register-Guard of Eugene, Ore., states the city had a Pigeon Task Force that would deploy 11 men with shotguns to shoot down the city’s pigeons every other Sunday.

The task force was comprised of sanitation workers and a police officer who would escort the group to collect the dead birds and make sure no one was harmed.
As of April 1965, the city killed 80,000 pigeons in five years.

Besides becoming the Amateur Sports Capitol of the World, I’d say the Pigeon Task Force was Indianapolis’s greatest success.

Today, there are shockingly few pigeons in Indianapolis, a remarkable feat for a city its size.

The city’s bird control probably helped it pull off such a smashing success as a Super Bowl host city.

Bloomington should follow Indianapolis’ lead and get rid of the pesky crows.
How will we protect the tired and the ornithophobic if we don’t get a handle on the birds?

How can we ever expect to become a great city if we can’t even get them out of our trees?

We need to kill the birds.

--arcarlis@indiana.edu