YUBA CITY, Calif. -- Yuba City is a good place to live. Ask any crow.
Every night, from October to March, as many as 1.5 million of the huge, squawking black birds come home to roost in the city's trees. The nightly invasion, described as the nation's largest crow roost, has locals running for cover by night and pressure-washing their sidewalks by day.As cities push outward, taking up historic crow habitat, the birds increasingly swarm to the cities to find warmth and food scraps during winter months, said Sutter County Agricultural Commissioner Mark Quisenberry. Under the city's most popular roosts, crow droppings pile up a quarter-inch thick, and some businesses spend $300 to $500 a week to clean up.
Yuba City Mayor Bob Barkhouse, who leads a crow task force, said the city can't find a solution and has asked for help from the state Department of Fish and Game in eradicating or relocating the flocks.
Towering trees around Yuba City's Fremont Medical Center are a natural magnet for thousands of birds looking for a warm place to sleep, said Walt Bringman, director of engineering for the hospital.
"The birds from Alfred Hitchcock's movie almost don't do it justice," said Bringman, comparing the nightly return of crows to Yuba City with the motion picture about swarming birds attacking a seaside community.
"It's astounding, it's a freak of nature."
If the crows become startled, flocks rise like thunder clouds and anyone walking in the hospital's parking lot is likely to be showered with white droplets.
"It was as if the trees were bird skyscrapers or bird condos," Bringman said. "Crows by the thousands were stacked 70 and 80 feet up. They're big, too. You've heard of pigeons being described as flying rats. Well, these are their big brothers, flying muskrats."
Tim Dalske, an office manager for Norwest Financial Co., said the perched crows, some weighing 2 pounds or more, actually collapsed some tree branches around the business.
Hospital officials in 1995 put tape recordings of crows in distress in waterproof containers and hung them in trees. It seemed to work for about two seasons, Bringman said, until the intelligent birds noticed none of their flock was really getting offed.
Meanwhile, Yuba City's crow population had swelled from 750,000 in 1991 to an estimated 1.3 million to 1.5 million, so Bringman figures the continual squawking drowned out the recordings anyway.
Security guards wearing raincoats to shield them from incoming crow waste banged on pots and pans to scare away the birds or thumped shovels on the sidewalks, with little effect.
Little can be done to abate the growing crow population, Quisenberry says. Because the birds are listed as a federal migratory species, there are restrictions on how they can be dealt with.
The city could get a permit from the state to hunt or poison the birds during crow season, but a plan to thin out the population in the late 1980s met with intense public protest.
Dist. by Scripps Howard News Service