Where it isn’t Christmas until the city shoots lasers at 20,000 crows

In Rochester, New York, there are telltale signs that the holiday season is underway.

Santa’s workshop opens at the outdoor ice rink downtown. There is the lighting of the pyramid of kegs at the local brewery. Productions of “A Christmas Carol” and “The Nutcracker” begin.

Then there are the tens of thousands of crows that descend on the city every day at dusk in early December, and the fireworks and lasers that are deployed to drive them away.

City officials and wildlife experts estimate upward of 20,000 crows roost downtown nightly.

“It’s like you’re in ‘The Birds,’” said Rachel Kudiba, referring to Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film about birds on a murderous rampage. Kudiba was one of four U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services specialists hired by the city to chase and haze the massive groups of crows.

An outbreak of West Nile virus decimated the American crow population in the early 2000s.

But no one would know it by the sight of the cawing, swirling cloud of jet-black crows over the waterfalls of the Genesee River. They come from miles around, wildlife experts say, seeking warmth in the city’s concrete grid and ambient light after foraging in fields.

The phenomenon plays out in urban centers, with reports of large roosts wintering in upstate New York cities such as Albany, Auburn and Poughkeepsie; in Danville, Illinois, in the Midwest; and in Portland, Oregon, and Sunnyvale, California, in the West.

Many cities have employed scare tactics to ward them off. But few seem as consistent in their regimen as Rochester, where the annual Yuletide ritual of shooing crows began in 2012.

For two or three nights during the season, wildlife specialists comb the city. They have been conducting annual hazing raids in Rochester long enough to have an idea of where the birds gather, and they get help from residents who, in response to city media campaigns, call the city’s 311 hotline.

When they locate a cluster, which they track by sound as much as by sight, they use a variety of techniques to rouse the crows. They shine spotlights, shoot off screaming fireworks, project laser beams onto nearby buildings and blast recordings of crows in distress. If those tactics don’t work, they clap.

The practices do not harm the crows, according to ornithologists and city officials. But that hasn’t stopped the flow of sympathy for the cagey birds on social media, including the “Rochesterians for Crows” Facebook page and a “City of Rochester vs the Crows” post on Reddit.

The crows typically decamp in boisterous groups of thousands, only to alight elsewhere in the city, commencing a game of cat-and-mouse that continues through midnight and picks up again a few hours before dawn the next day.

“It’s a vicious cycle,” Kudiba said after repelling a murder of crows outside St. Mary’s Church and nearby Washington Square Park, a favorite roosting spot.

Her partner in the operation, Daniel Hojnacki, a wildlife biologist, pointed a laser overhead from the driver’s seat of a pickup truck. Where do the birds go?

“Where we can’t find them,” he said, laughing.

Specialists say their goal isn’t to shoo the birds out of town altogether. That’s a fool’s errand. No laser beam can undo the winter homing pattern that has drawn these whip-smart birds to Rochester for decades.

Rather, the aim is to break up their roost into less raucous — and less messy — masses. Crows root through trash and drop their own kinds of bombs in the form of excrement.

Karen St. Aubin, Rochester’s director of operations, said the city spends about $9,000 a year on dispersing crows. It’s worth it, she said.

“We used to have to power wash benches, sidewalks, statues,” St. Aubin said. “It’s really about maintenance. Some of these larger roosts are in public places and they can make them unusable.”

Kevin McGowan, who studies crows at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said it sounded to him like Rochester’s approach was reasonable.

“You can get them out of a neighborhood or away from the town hall, but you’re not going to get rid of them,” McGowan said.

“It’s an ongoing thing,” he added. “But as I tell people, just having these large aggregations someplace you can see is totally cool.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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