Hordes of pesky crows causing ‘ruckus’ — so California city may fight back with lasers

Hordes of crows congregating in downtown Sunnyvale at night are an eye-catching sight in the California city.

“You look up in the sky and it’s almost like a planetarium,” resident Scott Kilbourn told KGO. “Where you see all these dots up in the sky and it’s just, I don’t know, nature at its best.”

Not everyone finds the enormous flocks, or “murders,” of crows so alluring, though.

“It’s fascinating at some level, but I’m not really a big fan of them to be honest,” Swaminathan Sundaramurthy told the station. “Because they do tend to congregate in very large numbers, and they create a lot of ruckus.”

Along with the noise, the birds harass outdoor diners at downtown restaurants.

“They’re very intimidating,” resident Katelin Parkos told KNTV. “Very reminiscent of ‘The Birds,’ the movie.”

They’re also extremely unsanitary, forcing the city to spray-wash a downtown park to get rid of the odor, The Mercury News reported.

At their wit’s end, city officials are now considering using green laser pointers to frighten the birds away.

“We’ve tried multiple things,” Mayor Larry Klein told KGO. “In the past, we’ve had falcons, we’ve put reflectors in our trees, and nothing seems to help.”

Resident Ken Ibbs, a former laser scientist, told The Mercury News that he uses laser pointers to chase crows from his backyard trees.

“The reason it frightens them away is the same reason it’s useful for giving seminars,” Ibbs told the publication. “It looks very bright. Green is particularly bright for things like crows. They have much more visual acuity.”

But the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society opposes the idea.

“I have real concerns about the use of lasers,” Matthew Dodder told KNTV. “Lasers can blind the birds, which is a death sentence for the birds because they can’t see, they can’t fly or feed properly.”

Proposals for dealing with the crows will be presented to the Sunnyvale City Council soon, officials said. Other possible options include pyrotechnic blasts to scare them away.

“It’s a surprisingly complicated problem and something that there’s a lot of requests for us to solve,” Vice Mayor Alysa Cisneros told The Mercury News.

This story was originally published January 12, 2022 at 12:09 PM with the headline "Hordes of pesky crows causing ‘ruckus’ — so California city may fight back with lasers."