Riverton, Wyo. – For Michele Kusel, they’ve made doing business difficult, getting home from work a chore, and life generally miserable.
They’re fearless and frightening. And when they cluster by the thousands in the trees outside her furniture store, some customers have had to pull out newspapers or umbrellas to get to their cars.
“You can hear the plop-plop hitting the umbrella. It’s just gross,” Kusel said.
Though not normally a skittish woman, what has Kusel so shaken are the crows – thousand and thousands of them – that have descended on this central Wyoming town of 9,000 people.
In a phenomenon that began several winters ago but seemed to peak in January, huge flocks have returned here to roost. Residents describe the birds with apocalyptic adjectives: “creepy,” “eerie,” even “evil.”
“You look up and it’s like a black sky is moving over you. I don’t know how to describe it,” said Mayor John Vincent, who estimated the numbers of crows in his community was in the tens of thousands, far more than the number of people.
But this is a town that prides itself as being at the heart of the real West. Grandfathers and great-grandfathers carved a community out of hard-bitten land, and they aren’t about to give it back.
So this month, Vincent issued an emergency decree, and ordered the city’s police to begin shooting as many of the birds as they can.
Using squads that stalk the birds at night with 12-gauge shotguns, police have killed nearly 2,000 in the first two weeks. The dead birds are piled into a trailer by volunteer cleanup teams. With as many as 400 birds a night, it can be a messy job.
“We’re just killing the heck out of them,” Riverton Police Chief John Snell said. “I just don’t know if we’re having much effect.”
Officials complain that since the roosting began, streets, sidewalks and parking lots in downtown Riverton have been carpeted in pounds of bird droppings. One car left in the city parking lot for several days was encased in a two-inch layer of the stuff.
But of all the questions the phenomenon has raised, one particularly vexing to residents is this: Why Riverton?
“It’s not because its citizens are evil and God has sent them a plague,” said Kevin McGowan, a crow expert at the Cornell Ornithology Lab in Ithaca, N.Y.
“This is about basic biology. Crows have always gathered in large groups in the winter,” he said.
What is new is that those roosts are moving increasingly into cities. Urban areas provide large trees, warmth and, at night, glowing street lamps. The light provides protections from predators like owls, and act, McGowan said, like a kind of avian night light.
In the center of an agricultural area with good food supplies, Riverton may have simply looked to a crow like home sweet home.
That’s little comfort to residents here. Merchants complain that droppings layering downtown smell and are a health hazard. Paint jobs on cars have been ruined, yards trashed, and cottonwood limbs as thick as 7 inches broken by the sheer weight of roosting birds.
Before the mayor’s emergency decree, frustrated residents had taken to shooting the crows on their own, posing a danger to public safety, officials say.
“It just got down to where if the citizenry didn’t try to protect themselves, their property would be just destroyed,” said Jere Bogrett, a 73-year-old former dry-cleaning store owner.
In one incident two years ago, police arrived to find dead crows piled in a dumpster and scattered on the ground amid smoking shells from Bogrett’s .410 gauge shotgun. Though it’s illegal to fire a gun in the city limits, he was never charged.
The birds are saddled with the baggage of myth. As scavengers, crows would gather over marching armies in Europe in anticipation of food. They became omens of death.
Shawn Peck, a third-grade teacher here, said her 12-year-old son swears that a flock of crows began pursuing him one day recently when he was out delivering newspapers. Others say that the massive clouds of black birds against the gray winter sky can be both fascinating and frightening.
“It’s so visual, it’s so beautiful. It’s also so horrible,” said Peck, 41. “It’s wonderfully creepy.”
Riverton can take comfort in the fact that it’s not alone. As crow numbers across the globe have grown and roosts have moved into urban areas, other cities have waged epic battles with the birds, including Chatham, Ontario; Lancaster, Penn.; and Tokyo.
John Marzluff, a crow expert in Seattle, said shooting the birds is unlikely to accomplish much. Harassing them with lasers or recorded predator sounds is better. Chatham got rid of theirs with falconers.
But Riverton’s frustrated mayor said the city has tried other methods and failed. A professional trapper was brought in last year to move the birds. Harassment teams have clapped boards together or used pellet guns.
“This was a last resort,” Mayor Vincent said. “We’re a town that takes pride in our homes, in how our public spaces look. There are a lot of farmers and ranchers here. The notion that a varmint can come in and tear the place up just doesn’t make sense to us.”
