Kagoshima Journal: Japan Fights Crowds Of Crows

KAGOSHIMA, Japan — Fanning out in small teams, the men in gray jumpsuits scour the streets and rooftops with binoculars, seeking to guard this city from a growing menace. They look for telltale signs: a torn garbage bag, a pile of twigs atop an electric pole or one of the black, winged culprits themselves.

A member of the Crow Patrol of Kyushu Electric Power in Kagoshima, Japan, looking for nests that are often found on poles.

“There’s one!” a shout goes up.

Sure enough, one of their quarry flies brazenly overhead: a crow, giving a loud, taunting caw as it passed.

This is the Crow Patrol of utility company Kyushu Electric Power, on the hunt for crows whose nests on electric poles have caused a string of blackouts in this city of a half-million on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu.

Blackouts are just one of the problems caused by an explosion in Japan’s population of crows, which have grown so numerous that they seem to compete with humans for space in this crowded nation. Communities are scrambling to find ways to relocate or reduce their crow populations, as ever larger flocks of loud, ominous birds have taken over parks and nature reserves, frightening away residents.

It is a scourge straight out of Hitchcock, and the crows here look and act the part. With wing spans up to a yard and intimidating black beaks and sharp claws, Japan’s crows are bigger, more aggressive and downright scarier than those usually seen in North America.

Attacks, though rare, do happen. Hungry crows have bloodied the faces of children while trying to steal candy from their hands. Crows have even carried away baby prairie dogs and ducklings from Tokyo zoos, city officials said.

While no one knows the precise number of crows in Japan, bird experts and government officials in cities across the nation say populations have increased enormously since the 1990s. Tokyo says the number of crows it has counted in large parks rose to 36,400 in 2001 from 7,000 in the late 1980s, prompting a trapping plan that cut the numbers to 18,200 last year. However, ornithologists say that the actual number in Tokyo is closer to 150,000 birds, and that some crows may have moved to different areas to avoid the traps.

Behind the rise, experts and officials say, has been the growing abundance of garbage, a product of Japan’s embrace of more wasteful Western lifestyles. This has created an orgy of eating for crows, which are scavengers. Some steps taken to reduce crows include putting garbage into yellow plastic bags, a color the birds supposedly cannot see through, and covering trash with fine-mesh netting, to prevent large beaks from reaching the goodies within.

Still, the crows have proven clever at foiling human efforts to control them. In Kagoshima, they are even trying to outsmart the Crow Patrol. The birds have begun building dummy nests as decoys to draw patrol members away from their real nests.

“They are trying to outfox us,” said Kazuhide Kyutoku, deputy chief of Kyushu Electric’s facilities safety group, which conducts the patrols. “They aren’t willing to give up territory to humans.”

The birds seem to be winning. Mr. Kyutoku said despite the twice-weekly patrols, which have removed 600 nests since they began three years ago, the number of nests keeps increasing, as have blackouts. The utility says there were three major cutoffs last year. The biggest was in March, when a strand of wire in a nest short-circuited power lines, briefly blacking out Kagoshima’s central port district. In another cutoff, some 610 homes and businesses lost power for 48 minutes when a crow stuck its beak into a high-voltage power line.

Crows have also shown a surprising ability to disrupt Japan’s super-modern technological infrastructure. In the last two years, utility companies in Tokyo reported almost 1,400 cases of crows cutting fiber optic cables, apparently to use as materials for nests. Blackouts have become common nationwide, including one last year in the northern prefecture of Akita that briefly shut down high-speed bullet train service.

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