The Birds, Part II: Moscow's Crows

Forty years ago the discovery of a crow's nest within the city limits was considered a good omen.


But now Moscow is afflicted with too much winged portentousness.


"If things go on as they are now, the number of Muscovites and crows in the city will soon be equal," said professor Valery Ilyichov, president of the Russian Ornithological Society. That may be some avian hyperbole, but the society does count more than a million of the bothersome birds. The problem has even attracted the attention of American diplomats: In a report last year listing conditions that merit 20 percent extra pay for harship, the U.S. embassy in Moscow cited crows that attack children's pets.


Ilyichov said crows are reproducing "like mad," because their natural enemies, hawks and falcons, have flown away -- driven out, like other birds of prey, by pollution. "Crows turned out to be more adaptable to our modern conditions," Ilyichov noted.


Fighting the crow invasion has proved difficult. A year ago the Moscow government approved the shooting of crows, with a cash bounty for hunters presenting a carcass or at least crow legs. But nature lovers and elderly people who had befriended the birds protested, and the program was canceled. "It might sound odd, but crows turn out to be the best friends of lonely old people, who feed them on their balconies," Ilyichov said. "They become quite tame. Often the birds are as attracted to their benefactors as dogs -- even to the point of not leaving the city in winter."


The hordes of crows reflect not friendship with man, but the sorry level of municipal cleanliness, said Natalia Rubenstein, an ornithologist at the Moscow Zoo, where the birds are a particular nuisance. "The dirtier a city is, the more crows it attracts," she said. The crows are lured by the increasing number of rubbish heaps and empty lots in Moscow and its suburbs, and have a particular fondness for the zoo and its feeding troughs.


The inmates at the zoo have become inured to the glossy intruders. A recently spotted emu on an open-air lawn seemed oblivious of a huge crow perched on its back. One old and battered crow kept a vigil on the rim of a white goose's nest in hopes of snatching an egg.


But a crow's favorite delicacy is herring head, and zoo workers have scattered them in special traps all around the territory. The beauty is that once one bird is trapped, the others follow, their flocking impulses stronger than their survival instincts. The zoo's birds of prey can then eat crow.


Until recently, some of the crows' preferred roosts were the golden domes of the Moscow Kremlin -- probably because of the high position over the city. A few months ago, visitors to the Kremlin may have noticed flocks of crows sliding down the churches' cupolas, Iliuchov said. While it no doubt seemed amusing to the crows, the sliding scratched the gold surface of the domes.


The Kremlin issued an SOS to ornithologists, who made a recording simulating the cries of a crow in excruciating pain. Kremlin guards were equipped with falcons, and every time a guard took a falcon out for a hunt, the tape with the shrieking crow was played on maximum volume. "Crows were going into a state of shock. Their desire to climb domes disappeared instantly," Ilyichov said contentedly.


But neither the shrieking tapes nor the stinking fish heads can be applied on a large scale. The only practical cure is to cut down on the exposed trash and reduce the number of empty lots. "In that case crows will simply have nothing to eat, and leave," Ilyichov said.


But Moscow city officials are in no hurry to solve the problem, Ilyichov said. Perhaps they recall the British superstition that if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, disaster will ensue.