15 December 2025
Now that it’s really cold — 10°F this morning — Pittsburgh’s winter crow flock roosts in the warmest areas of city street trees and building roofs. The “poot” they leave behind is so unpleasant that people brainstorm about ways to scare crows.
In the city it’s not as simple as putting up a scarecrow. This one is scary to humans!
Wooden “clappers” used to be effective at moving the crows away from Univ of Pittsburgh campus, but the crows are bored by them now.
In 2023 Pitt played a scarecrow recording in the trees near the Cathedral of Learning. Alas it doesn’t work as well now. See a video of the recording here at Trying to Move the Crows.
In 2015 in Japan people put up signs on a building saying “Crows Do Not Enter.” It worked because people read the signs and stared into the building looking for crows. Crows hate to be watched that intently. See Crows Do Not Enter! for more details.
What are crows always afraid of? Great horned owls! The owls are large and powerful, fly silently in the dark, and will eat crows.
The great horned owl pair that nested under the Panther Hollow Bridge last winter is hooting and courting now. My friend Andrea B heard one making low pitched hoots from a roof on Parkview Avenue and the other responding in a higher pitch from Schenley Park’s Junction Hollow. (The low pitch is the female because she’s larger. The higher pitch is the male.)
Crows in the know don’t sleep in Schenley Park and they avoid flying over Parkview. They don’t want to encounter this mother owl whose nest was a success last year. The nest is empty right now but its territory is just a half mile from the crows’ current staging area at Frick Fine Arts.
In Everglades NP, they have a problem with black vultures eating the rubber on cars. Once, I saw a dead black vulture hanging from a tree in the parking lot. There were no problems with vultures eating rubber that day. I hate to suggest it, but what if a dead crow hanging from a tree could do the same thing?
Jim, I’ve seen photos of this in Britain and an experiment by crow researchers in the U.S. who got permission to use the carcass of a crow that died a natural death (watching how crows reacted to it). When people are particularly plagued by crows, advisors suggest using crow effigies. See Crow effigy on a roof.
In Santa Monica CA, a large flock of crows had their daily sunset “cocktail hour” on the telecom wires in the alley behind my house. I counted 90 once but they move around so the count was never completely accurate. I liked watching them but was grateful they roosted several blocks away.
A red tailed hawk decided to occupy the top of one of the telephone poles, using it as an observation tower. The crows were very upset, coming as a flock to circle, cawing loudly, above the hawk, who was unconcerned. That only made the crows more upset, so, one at a time, a few started dive-bombing the hawk. Again the hawk paid them no mind and in fact it was almost like I could see it “rolling its eyes.”
After a few days of this, I saw the hawk on top of the pole with a dead crow. It didn’t seem to be eating it but rather just holding it in it’s claws, and later in the day the dead crow was draped over one of the wires a short distance—maybe 10 feet…. from the pole where the hawk still perched. It was obviously placed there, since it was too far from the pole to have simply fallen on the wire. The crows were very vocal about this but then disappeared. The dead crow remained on the wire for about 5 days, and eventually the hawk left for other pastures.
This seemed like intentional behavior on the part of the irritated hawk and it’s well known that crows mourn their dead and gather for death rituals. Even after the corpse disappeared, it took weeks before the flock came back at sunset and even when they did, there were less of them than before. My home office had a glass wall so I had a full view of the whole event. So interesting.